Where Are All the High-Resolution Desktop Displays?

MrSeb writes "Ever since the release of the iPhone 4 with its 326 pixels-per-inch (PPI) Retina display, people have wondered about the lack of high-PPI desktop displays. The fact is, high-resolution desktop displays do exist, but they're incredibly expensive and usually only used for medical applications. Here, ExtremeTech dives into the world of desktop displays and tries to work out why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."

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Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because of 2 reasons.

1) It's currently "good enough" for most people
2) Because of the 1080 standard which has a large advantage due to economy of volume sales which would be lost with constant incremental improvements

Basically, the cost is not justified for it's marketability (in most manufacturer's eyes).

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be happy with a keyboard with two apostrophe keys since you like using them so much.

Re:Easy

[Z00L00K]

You can actually get 16:10 displays with 1920x1200 resolution to a decent price. Those few extra pixels actually helps quite a bit.

But if you are willing to go up to a larger screen, 27" or above then you can get a size of 2560x1440. But you have to pay for it.

What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.

Re:Easy

[Nadaka]

If you are willing to drop $1200 you can get a 2560 x 1600

Re:Easy

[JDG1980]

But if you are willing to go up to a larger screen, 27" or above then you can get a size of 2560x1440. But you have to pay for it.

Not as much as you might think, if you don't care about name brands. Search for "Yamakasi Catleap" on eBay. These are South Korean-made 27" monitors with 2560x1440 resolution. They cost $300-$320 including shipping. I don't own one myself, but they seem to be fairly well regarded by those who do. The panels are probably made by the same companies as the name brand monitors anyway, since there aren't that many panel vendors out there.

What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.

The designers of ATSC chose a 16:9 aspect ratio because it matches many theatrical films and offers a better viewing experience than 4:3 on movies and TV shows. It wasn't their intent to create a de facto standard for computer monitors; that is due to cost-cutting on the part of the consumer electronics industry.

Re:Easy

[niftydude]

+1 I have two of these - they are really nice ips monitors, and I don't have any dead pixels on mine.

My only complaint was that I had to frig around in xorg.conf to get them working. But they are sweet monitors.

Re:Easy

[NJRoadfan]

Wow, that Engrish in the auction listings seems to have no bounds.

Re:Easy

[Anubis IV]

How you got modded Informative is beyond me. Repeat after me: 1080p is a resolution, not a density, and you need to standardize on a density to achieve economy of scale.

Manufacturers make panels with specific pixel densities. They can then cut those panels to a number of different sizes in order to achieve a number of different resolutions. If I cut a high-density panel at a small size, I can get 1080p, or I could cut a low-density display at a large size to also achieve 1080p. 1080p just means that there are 1920 pixels across the display and 1080 pixels down the display, but it gives no indication of how you got there. And because there are dozens or hundreds of different density panels to choose from, you cannot achieve economies of scale unless you standardize on specific densities.

As for "good enough", it's all a matter of what we can see. The iPhone 4's display was called a "Retina Display" because it had passed the threshold at which the human eye could distinguish individual pixels when held at a normal viewing distance (12" was what they said, I believe). Similarly, the new iPad has a Retina Display even though it had a lower pixel density, because they consider a normal viewing distance for it to be slightly further away. "Good enough" for most people will be at the point when they can no longer distinguish pixels. At that point, the pixel density race will likely become about as moot as the dpi race between printer manufacturers was, and as the megapixel race between camera manufacturers is quickly becoming (note: there are benefits to more megapixels, but they're already past the point where the normal user cares since most of them aren't blowing up their images afterwards).

Of course, there are benefits to going even higher in density than "retina" levels, since Vernier acuity allows us to still distinguish slight variations in lines, even if we are not able to distinguish the individual pixels making them up. As a result, you can still make curves look smoother or straighter by increasing the pixel density further.

Re:Easy

[datavirtue]

"Catleap" WTH? Themention of a monitor with the name Catleap on eBay and all of the sudden I have puke in my mouth.

Re:Easy

[anethema]

The only problem is this is barely over 100 ppi, which is kind of what the article writer is complaining about.

I know you're just answering the grandparents question, showing the 27" for cheap, but it is no great stride in PPI.

There was another post though saying gamers have been begging for higher PPI for a long time and I somewhat disagree. This is the area I would least want higher PPI. 1080p with nice anti aliasing etc.

But for desktop use, web browsing, reading documents, etc higher ppi is a godsend.

Re:Easy

[tlhIngan]

Not as much as you might think, if you don't care about name brands. Search for "Yamakasi Catleap" on eBay. These are South Korean-made 27" monitors with 2560x1440 resolution. They cost $300-$320 including shipping. I don't own one myself, but they seem to be fairly well regarded by those who do. The panels are probably made by the same companies as the name brand monitors anyway, since there aren't that many panel vendors out there.

Or when you think about it - prices haven't really changed all that much. Prices on the low end have dropped, but good stuff is still priced pretty much the same as it has over the years.

A good 20" CRT monitor would've cost $2000+ easy in the 90s (one that could do 16x12 and not be fuzzy/blurry/blooming but nice and crisp). Heck, a 17" monitor doing 1024x768 flatscreen would've been several hundred bucks.

Likewise, nice monitors are still several hundred bucks. It's just that we're used to seeing huge 20" LCD monitors go for $100 or less that makes us think they're a good deal. It's the same as a $500 laptop - the good ones still cost a lot of money (want a GPU and more than 1366x768? You'll be spending $1000 minimum).

All that's happened to technology is manufacturers have perfected the art of making something to a price. A laptop for $500? What bits and pieces can we chop for that? A monitor for $100? Sure! What can we sacrifice?

Ditto 1080p displays - because of the commodization of technology, the video circuits to drive a 1080p display is insanely cheap - when millions of TVs are made, it's easy to make a very cheap computer monitor by reusing the exact same parts.

Anyhow, hopefully the Apple rumors are true and high-res displays are coming down the pipeline.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I used to watch videos with my friends and get the infuriating response that they wanted the video to be enlarged because it was too small. I've also heard that used as justification for not setting the screen resolution properly as the text would then be too small. Well, there is a font size setting for a reason and that's how you're supposed to solve that.

I can't help but wonder if that doesn't have anything to do with it. Right now I have to do everything on a 1366x768 monitor because I'm thousands of miles away from my 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 monitors so I have to just sort of live wit it.

In practice though, I think people tend to be more concerned with the total resolution than the actual PPI measurement.

Re:Easy

[jameson71]

Would be better if it supported DisplayPort as well as dual DVI. I can't use dual DVI with my docking station.

Re:Easy

[The Master Control P]

Just to nitpick regarding megapixels - we're long past the point where more megapixels is simply retarded marketoid spiel, since any camera sold based on "Moar Meguhpixelsez!" will not contain a CCD with a good low-noise readout to take advantage of them, or be paired with optics capable of resolving them in the first place.

My $150 point'n'shoot has a 14MP mode. I typically leave it at 6MP, and the optics still clearly cannot resolve per-pixel detail upon inspection.

Re:Easy

[ChunderDownunder]

For around that price you could probably get an extra 2 dual out video cards, a 6 head Vesa desk mount and six 21" LEDs.

[Screen A][Screen B][Screen C]
[Screen D][Screen E][Screen F]

5760x2160 OR

[Screen A][Screen B]
[Screen C][Screen D]
[Screen E][Screen F]

3840x3240

The energy usage a factor, obviously! :-)

Re:Easy

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

It's all about TV and 720p. The companies that make monitors can achieve a greater economy of scale by manufacturing for that segment only.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you haven't had a decent camera in your life.

The Nikon D700 has with 12MPone of the best low noise CCD's and the new D800 is with 36MP no worse.

And Nikkor's lenses will resolve those resolutions just fine.

--
Teun

Re:Easy

[Culture20]

"Catleap, staring Scott Bacula as the voice of Whiskers will return after these messages."
"Me-oh boy!"

Re:Easy

[SimonTheSoundMan]

He's talking about $100 point and shoot cameras, 14 mega pixels on a 1/8 inch sensor. The D800 isn't anything special, it has the same pixel density as a Canon 7D/60D/450D. D800 does a good job with noise as it has an newer generation sensor. Look at the Sony F65 for newer tech, 18 stops dynamic range, amazing colour and handles high ISO really well, but you'll only get that at a price of $100,000. I shoot with a D4, it is clean at high ISO. You get what you pay for.

I also shoot with a Contax 645 with Leaf Aptus II back. Produces 27mp images, has good colour and dynamics, but totally unusable past 200 ISO. $40,000 camera with older tech, medium format is dead if no new technology is made. Here you do not get what you pay for.

Re:Easy

[itsdapead]

Manufacturers make panels with specific pixel densities. They can then cut those panels to a number of different sizes in order to achieve a number of different resolutions.

Citation needed, methinks. I suspect its a bit more complicated than that - what with each panel needing a pattern of TFTs and all the interconnections fabricating onto it.

Even so there would be a lot of steps between cutting your sheet of "LCD" to size and making a finished panel with all the wiring and backlighting in place, which would all depend on the panel size and resolution.

As for densities, TV manufacturers already have to make a range of screen sizes at 1080p resolution, which means different densities.

The "economies of scale" come from being able to use the same, or very similar, panels for both TVs and computer monitors - whatever the manufacturing process.

Re:Easy

[kermidge]

A quibble re decent display on laptops - I picked up a Toshiba at Office Depot with 17" 1920x1080 for a hair over $500 in late 2009; came with a second-gen dual-core, 4GB RAM (which I upped to 8) and integrated graphics and plays HD just fine. Civ 5 using DX11 under Windows 7 was smooth with most settings set medium to high.

Re:Easy

[Electricity Likes Me]

Eh, the real problem is the benefits of PPI tend to aesthetic rather then practical.

Like, I'd much rather use all those extra pixels to increase my work area since I don't need all that many of them to resolve text.

Re:Easy

[Bing Tsher E]

The 'branding' folks are pleased. 'This one is properly conditioned now' one of them exclaims to the other.

Re:Easy

[Sloppy]

What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.

Maybe we should also blame HDTV's success for such high expectations of low price. People are talking about $800 (roughly the low end where > 1080 starts) as being "expensive" for a computer monitor. And if you don't need more than 1920x1080, then a quick look at prices confirms that $800 is expensive. Yet back in the mid/late 1990s I remember buying a pair of 19" CRT monitors (I still have them, but they're not in use -- don't remember the exact resolution but I'm pretty sure the horiz part was less than 1920) and they each cost about that much. And that was mid-range, not really high-end stuff.

$800 for a geek's monitor is not expensive. Either settle for mainstream (1920x1080) resolution (which if not ideal, isn't really terrible either) or pay real money, where the stuff you're looking for starts at around $800 and goes up from there -- just like it has always been.

We're all just frustrated that our hard disks are down to under a hundred bucks a Terabyte, SSDs are even viable, CPUs are offering incredible jaw-dropping value, immense amounts of RAM are dirt cheap, yet a few things (monitors and tape drives) aren't quite following the same trends. So let's bitch about monitors and tape drives. ;-)

Re:Easy

[MtViewGuy]

There's also another reason: on PC's, if you go beyond 1920x1080 resolution, you need to have a higher-end graphics card or on-board graphics to handle the higher resolution with decent graphics redraw speeds. And that costs money--sometimes serious money.

Re:Easy

[coats]

And at the time, they promised us that 16:10 aspect ratio was the long-term compromise between the 4:3 that computer people wanted and the 16:9 the media people wanted. It shows that the media people are liars! (but we knew that already...)

Re:Easy

[jedidiah]

Yes. So we come back to the obvious answer: price.

Most people don't want to pay $800 for their monitor or their camera. So that makes the market for higher end gear vanishingly small.

There should be enough pros to support either though. The results just won't be very affordable or very widespread. You will still see a dearth of "cooler stuff".

You "can't find it" because you wouldn't be willing to pay for it if you could find it.

Re:Easy

[Skapare]

Yes, those and larger are available. But I have always preferred to buy monitors in a real store so I can see them operate first. I need to know the color spectrum they use, and NONE of the online retailers makes that data available. In a store I can quickly see if the monitor is suitable or not. Online, it is impossible. My latest monitor, a 1920x1200 NEC EA241WM, I did buy online because I saw it on someone else's desktop and it had the right spectrum. I bought one for home and ordered one at work. When people at work saw it, most of them wanted one, too. Then newbies got the crappy Dell hand-me-downs.

Re:Easy

[Skapare]

The designers of ATSC chose a 16:9 aspect ratio because it matches many theatrical films and offers a better viewing experience than 4:3 on movies and TV shows. It wasn't their intent to create a de facto standard for computer monitors; that is due to cost-cutting on the part of the consumer electronics industry.

Most movies are still chopped or letterboxed. It is NOT a MATCH of theatrical films. It is a COMPROMISE between theatrical films and other stuff like old TV shows and crappy B films. What will match theatrical films is 64:27 ... as in 4096x1728. If they come out with a monitor like that in a usable spectrum, I'd buy it up to $2k.

Re:Easy

[Skapare]

Resolution is for cameras. 1920x1080 is a GEOMETRY (a crappy one). 1920x1200 is a GEOMETRY (slightly better).

Re:Easy

[Anubis IV]

The cutting thing is common knowledge, though I did simplify a bit for the sake of making my point. Here's the top link from Google if you search for "LCD manufacturing process". Here's the second link from Google if you want a better description of how it applies to TFTs and the like. The short version is that they decide on a density, manufacture accordingly, then cut, fill with liquid crystal, and wire up.

As for manufacturers making 1080p at various sizes, I completely agree. That was the whole point I was making, since that's the reason they have difficulty achieving economies of scale. Apple has managed to achieve that sort of economy by standardizing on two densities for their entire iPhone line. Similarly, their iPad line is standardized on two densities. That allows them to use the same substrate for millions of devices and thus save on having to maintain manufacturing lines that can handle a variety of substrates at various densities.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but this "common knowledge" is only true for people who don't know anything about manufacturing LCD's (like John Gruber, and apparently madehow.com). No one who works in the industry thinks this. Your second link is much more accurate, but still not quite complete.

Go cut an original iPhone LCD (480x320, 163ppi) display in half and let me know if you get two working iPod Video (240x320, 163ppi) displays. I'll even let you pump back in the liquid crystal that leaks out and re-seal it. It's ok, I'll wait here.

What, it didn't work?

The reason is clear if you take apart an LCD further than iFixit does and look at the glass. You'll see lots of circuitry around the border of the active area which must be patterned BEFORE the cells are scribed from the mother glass. That border area is needed for all the traces that carry power & signal to the sub-pixels. There's also a piece of silicon to drive it and talk to the rest of the system. The display size including border area, driver silicon (selected in part for resolution), *and* density must all be spec'd at the outset. Once its decided, those processing masks are locked for a particular mother sheet size. New display size = new border rules, new driver silicon, new masks. A whole new design to prove out before shipping.

It's a lovely fantasy, but Apple (or their vendors) will not be "re-cutting" 960x640 iPhone 4 LCD's into any other 326 ppi LCD. If Apple wants LCD's that size, they have to be designed from scratch. Pixel density is only a tiny portion of making a working LCD, even though its virtually the only part the user encounters.

As for your second paragraph, its also not true. Standardizing on pixel densities only helps software. Each enclosure design change drives a new LCD outline, such that displays that are functionally identical to the user may not be interchangeable. And sometimes there are other changes not visible to the naked eye that cause LCD's to be unique. Apple's economies of scale are based on making lots of a single LCD model, not density. As soon as they switch to a new model, they start over. But the volume is still huge.

If you don't believe me, I'll wait here again while you try and plug and iPhone3G display into an iPhone3GS. I'll give you a hint, that doesn't work either.

This isn't unique to LCD. OLED, e-Ink, etc are all the same, even the "flexible" ones.

Re:Easy

[Sponge Bath]

...staring Scott Bacula

Bakula. You are thinking of Dracula. Though, Bakula as a vampire captain in Enterprise would have been entertaining. He would have ears to match T'Pol.

Re:Easy

[AmiMoJo]

HDTV might actually be what pushes us to the next level now that Quad HD panels are becoming available. Sharp are making 22" 3840Ã--2160 panels already.

Re:Easy

[Nadaka]

6 good 21 inch LED screens with small/no bevel will cost around $1200 by by themselves. Not counting the mounting rack. Though I would only need a second radeon 7970 to push the pixels fast enough to not notice.

Re:Easy

[wzinc]

I used to have three Samsung 2343BWx (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001317) monitors (2048x1152). My main issue was that with anything higher than 1920, you need dual-link everything. That means a simple HDMI-DVI or DisplayPort-DVI adapter won't work; you need a $100 active adapter, which plugs into USB for power. Aside from being expensive, you need to restart them every so often, because they stop working. I downgraded to 1920 monitors, and I got rid of the adapters. Everything is much simpler now.

Re:Easy

[Timmmm]

Manufacturers make panels with specific pixel densities. They can then cut those panels to a number of different sizes in order to achieve a number of different resolutions.

Just to be clear (maybe you knew this), but you make it sound like there is a huge sheet of "screen" and they cut different sized rectangles out of it to get the different displays. That isn't the case at all. They screen sizes have to be chosen before they start doing anything.

Re:Easy

[jools33]

To say that the D800 isn't anything special - have you really used one? Yes I know the pixel pitch is the same as a D7000 - but the D800 is all about resolution at near to base ISOs - and to be honest the images are useable at higher isos than most medium formats I have seen. The D800 sensor - is pushing the limits of what many of the Nikkor lenses can resolve - at all but their optimum appertures - if you take a look at the D800 review by Advanced Photographer (UK mag) for the current issue - they pixel peep with the 14-24 f/2.8 - and there you can clearly see that definition is lost for all but the optimum apertures. The 14-24 f/2.8G is widely recognised as one of Nikons sharpest lenses. So at around 36MP we are clearly pushing the limits of what a 35mm lens can resolve.

Re:Easy

[PeeAitchPee]

Absolutely the resolution on the D800/E (or even Canon 5D MK III) will push the limits of what 35mm lenses can resolve. You *will* see it. For better landscapes or studio work, you need bigger (better) lenses, with a bigger sweet spot to get you away from the edges of the lenses where the flaws start to become apparent.

More pixels require bigger, better lenses. We shoot art repro with a BetterLight Super 8K digital scan back -- 12,000 x 16,000 pixels max resolution in one shot in 48-bit color -- that's a 1.1 GB file for a single TIFF -- *and* it's a 4x5 view camera-based system which lets us use the best large format lenses in the world. The lens size and quality is the biggest advantage over 35mm, but the system also uses a trilinear CCD (three discrete color channels) so there's no Bayer pattern interpolation. The color rendition is unmatched. But, you must use constant lighting (no flash), and the subject can't move -- so it's only good for still-life studio work and landscapes with no movement.

Re:Easy

[otuz]

Or for an equivalent price, an second-hand 200ppi, 22" 3840x2400 IBM T221 IPS display (or one of its rebranded clones, like ViewSonic VP2290b).

Re:Easy

[otuz]

Like, I'd much rather use all those extra pixels to increase my work area since I don't need all that many of them to resolve text.

It's actually both. I get increased work area as well as high-enough resolution for reading print media like PDF's with fullscreen scaling, without having to zoom and pan on the detailed parts.

Re:Easy

[otuz]

You are just nitpicking here. Manufacturing displays is much like manufacturing integrated circuits. You can use the density of the manufacturing process to either make many smaller area devices per silicon wafer or glass substrate or fewer larger devices with the same density. Same goes for paper. For an A3-sized printer, you could print one A3-sized image, two A4-sized images, four A5-sized images, sixteen A6-sized images etc.

Re:Easy

[otuz]

I have one of those also and it works with most single-link DVI outputs. I have had just one case, with an Intel GMA 950, which couldn't supply the bandwidth, so I had to cut down the size to 2040x1152. Those 8 rows made all the difference in bandwidth and I suspect it's a flaw in the display adapter.
Maximum resolutions are in any case just a function of bandwidth. You can go higher, if you drop the refresh rate. The formula is quite easy; required bandwidth in bytes = width * height * bytes per pixel * frames per second. So, for instance the 2048x1152x3x60 requires 405MB/sec (or 3.24Gbps), which is still within the limits of what a single-link DVI should provide: 3.96Gbps / 495GB/sec.

Re:Easy

[otuz]

Sorry, 495MB/sec for the latter.

Re:Easy

[Rich0]

I for one really miss 4:3 monitors. I just bought one that was VGA-only the other day mainly because it was cheap and 4:3.

I could care less for 16:9 screens. I don't mind letterboxing at all - it isn't like my viewable area is any less. In most settings the display is horizontally constrained. I couldn't put a wider monitor on my desk if I wanted to - it would waste too much space. However, above the monitor is nothing but 5 feet of empty space. I don't need to fill all that space, but I certainly don't mind filling something closer to 4:3 than 16:9.

For larger TVs I can see why I wouldn't want to waste the money on LCD surface that isn't used most of the time. However, that space gets plenty of use on my computer monitor...

Re:Easy

[Henk Poley]

2560 x 1440 is a wee bit cheaper though: https://global.ebay.com/search/?Query=2560+1440

Re:Easy

[Pope]

The designers of ATSC chose a 16:9 aspect ratio because it matches many theatrical films and offers a better viewing experience than 4:3 on movies and TV shows. It wasn't their intent to create a de facto standard for computer monitors; that is due to cost-cutting on the part of the consumer electronics industry.

16:9 (aka 1.78) doesn't match any film aspect ratio, standard 35mm is 1.85, which is why properly-made movies will still have some slight letterboxing on widescreen displays. Otherwise the studio's fucked up and zoomed in to get rid of them.

SGI 1600SW

[jmd]

In 1998 SGI was ahead of the pack. @ 110dpi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_1600SW

Re:SGI 1600SW

[Anonymous Coward]

something more in the consumer space (though a crt) from 2000:
reviews.cnet.com/crt-monitors/demo-17in-16-0v/1707-3175_7-2677213.html

1920x1440 @ 17" ~= 141dpi

decently priced at the time as well
it went all down hill from there unfortunately
only recently things had finally caught up
but i guess that was because lcd just didn't cut it for quality images

gotta hand it to apple's marketing department though
getting hipster tech sites creaming themselves over the 'retina display'
considering there were phones that beat apple to the punch:
gsmarena.com/toshiba_g900-1905.php
gsmarena.com/toshiba_g910___g920-2231.php
gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x1-2246.php

No OS support.

[Zadaz]

Neither of the most popular desktop operating systems (Windows, OS X) work very well at arbitrary DPI. Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings. For example hard-coded interface layouts can mean that controls will be displayed outside the window area and are therefore inaccessible.

Re:No OS support.

[starseeker]

If we have to wait for "proper" OS support, they'll never come - the OS support won't be fully fixed until there is a demand for it. And the higher cost/lower yield for high PPI display production means it's a risky, difficult task to try boostraping the market from the manufacturing side.

I'm hoping a hybrid approach might be workable - at SIGGRAPH a few years ago, Microsoft was presenting work on technology for splitting a display signal up over multiple screens. If a way could be found to mount multiple iPhone-type screens into a monitor configuration and translate input over them, that might offer a viable way forward.

High density PPI displays are extremely expensive to produce because of the zero-defect-over-large-surface-area manufacturing issues. Since iPhone screens are smaller and already being produced in large numbers, it might be more practical to splice a bunch of those together. Edge visibility when "stacked" is probably the greatest physical hurdle - I'd guess it's a toss up between that and the inability of current graphics cards to drive such a monitor for "biggest practical hurdle."

Still, if one manufacturing process could turn out vast numbers of small screens that can either be used for phones or assembled into monitors... that seems to me like the only viable approach to the "too expensive to manufacture" problem you face with things like the IBM T221.

Re:No OS support.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Honestly, even in the land of tight hardware control and contempt for legacy applications that is Apple's little post-PC-playground, the challenges of resolution changes are on display(literally)...

Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck. The same thing occurred when the iPad display received a resolution boost.

Arbitrary DPI is a nontrivial problem, especially if you aren't willing to abandon all the legacy crap at the same time, and cherry-picked DPI increases that carefully match trivial special cases in scaling aren't cheap.

Re:No OS support.

[White Flame]

Solution: Enjoy lots of high-density information onscreen, without "OS support".

Re:No OS support.

[NormalVisual]

Edge visibility when "stacked" is probably the greatest physical hurdle

I dunno - people *loved* the old Sony Trinitron CRTs, even though they had painfully obvious shadows from the stabilizing wires on the aperture grille.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS. Apple had a 30" monitor with massive resolution, Dell brought it too, then Apple decided to pull the plug. But I'm sure many people here has a 30" monitor on their desk. Apple's came out at 1800, went down to 1500. When Dell put theirs out, was 1200, and the price hasn't come down.

Re:No OS support.

[atisss]

They don't need to be zero-defect, as you won't be able to see defects unless they are over some threshold.
When LCDs first appeared, it was considered normal to have up to 3 or 5 bad pixels from factory.

Re:No OS support.

[dgatwood]

High density PPI displays are extremely expensive to produce because of the zero-defect-over-large-surface-area manufacturing issues.

This. The failure rate for a panel equals the subpixel failure rate times the number of subpixels. A 2x increase in DPI means at minimum a 4x increase in the percentage of defective panels, and that's if you managed to keep the subpixel failure rate constant as you doubled the density. In practice, I'd expect it to be worse than 4x. And even at current DPIs, I've read that large LCD panels still have about a 10% reject rate as of a couple of years ago, which means you'd probably have to toss about half of them if you doubled the DPI....

On the other hand, if they did it right, they could ostensibly build the panels in such a way that a defective panel could be remanufactured into a dozen smaller panels for mobile phone use (discarding the one with the bad subpixel), and then they could cut their waste to near zero. I wonder if anybody has attempted such a design....

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let's hope for a 3840x2160 display. Then it'll be 16:9 video compatible and still be a nice high res for things that support it.

Heck, the iPad 3 is 2048x1536 for the same reason and it looks pretty amazing. I really think manufactures have just standardized because of HD content for now this should be a good progression strategy.

Re:No OS support.

[dgatwood]

Depends on whether they are stuck on or off. One stuck-on pixel is completely unacceptable and very, very obvious even at a glance. Several stuck-off pixels are often unnoticeable unless they are near one another.

Re:No OS support.

[Endymion]

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

As long as windows apps scale badly, there's a strong incentive to *not* produce a high-PPI display; customers would likely blame the monitor for "screwing up windows".

Re:No OS support.

[bhcompy]

Annoying and normal are different things. Many of the warranties up until the latter half of the last decade(I don't know what they say now, I haven't bought an LCD in ages) said that a few dead pixels were normal/acceptable and claims would only be had if you had some type of combination of all dead pixels and/or dead pixels of a certain color(in the 6-10 range).

Re:No OS support.

[bhcompy]

Meh, 3840x2400 would be better. Still 16:9 compatible, but more vertical pixels.

Re:No OS support.

[tbird81]

Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level,

Why is that surprising?

Apple is renown for wanting to work only with Apple-approved hardware.

Re:No OS support.

[DarwinSurvivor]

WTF does "16:9 compatible" mean?

The closest I can figure is "horizontal pixel count divisible by 16" but if you already have a 120px horizontal bars, why would you really care that you have up to 8px vertical ones?!?

Re:No OS support.

[Pentium100]

Can't Windows just scale the image if the app is not marked as "multiple DPI compatible"? Instead of scaling the text etc, why doesn't Windows just render the image (like a screenshot) and scale that (together with active areas)?

Though I would like a high DPI monitor (currently using a 24" CRT at 1920x1200) so that I could fit more things on the screen.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

The poor interface is mostly old software. My laptop runs at 133 dpi (1920x1200), and have had very very few problems (but have seen what you are talking about). The biggest problem was hard coded web sites, but today most sites scale just fine. I just want something higher res to replace my laptop! I have actually held off replacing it because I do not want to go down in screen quality, and can't justify $3000.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably not quite practical. For desktop displays, you probably don't want much more than 180 dpi as additional pixel density becomes largely wasted based on the distance people tend to sit from their displays. Unfortunately, the dpi is nowhere near good enough for a smart phone, where you'd want at least 240 or more depending on the size of the device. It could possibly work for tablets, though.

Re:No OS support.

[MisterSquid]

Apple had a 30" monitor with massive resolution, Dell brought it too, then Apple decided to pull the plug.

When I first arrived in the Bay Area to start working as a web developer, I bought one of these gorgeous 30" screens. It was beautiful. It was crystal clear. It was too frickin' big.

Even when my seat was adjusted ergonomically, the top of the monitor (i.e. the menubar) was just high enough I was every so slightly lifting my chin to look at it. I started noticing not feeling "settled" when using the main monitor.

The monitor also obscured more of the beautiful view outside the window than I wanted it to. It was that big.

I tried to stay with it for about 10 days before I realized I had to downgrade the monitor for usability! It ended up saving me $800 to boot.

Re:No OS support.

[simcop2387]

I've actually got an interestingly broken one. It isn't "off" or "on" but only has about 4 states in between instead of the 2^6 that the others have. Certain colors it's overbright, others its overdark. It's very weird to see and play with.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

That you can display 16:9 video on ~90% of the screen instead of ~75% on 4:3?
That you can display 16:9 video and subtitles or controls, precisely fitting the screen?

Re:No OS support.

[Ed Avis]

At work I run Windows XP at 200 per cent font size and it works pretty well. The biggest problem is badly designed websites that specify fixed pixel sizes. For those I sometimes have to Ctrl-minus in Firefox to get down to 'normal' font size.

Re:No OS support.

[Ed Avis]

If you set font size to exactly 200 per cent then it still snaps to pixel boundaries just as well as normal size. With the apps I use on Windows XP (Firefox, PuTTY, Outlook, Visual Studio) things work pretty well.

Re:No OS support.

[shutdown -p now]

It's even worse than that: the horrible legacy of hacks that windows uses pretty much guarantees that apps will always render horribly in anything by the default PPI. Their rounding "tricks" cause the text to scale inconsistently, as it's snapping individual letters to horizontal pixel boundaries. (err, it's more complicated than that; see the above link for a very well written discussion of the problem, and a very nice discussion of font rendering issues in general)

Pixel snapping is what gives clear, crisp text on current (low-DPI) monitors. Call it a "hack" if you want, but the only alternative is to have blurry text, and use larger and bolder fonts to compensate for that (see also: OS X).

For high-DPI, yeah, it doesn't work so well. Which is why various Windows frameworks were trying to switch to ideal rendering for a long time now - WPF did just that in 2007, for example, and people hated it.

These days, WPF (for .NET apps) and DirectWrite (for everything else) both give an option of using either ideal or pixel-snapped rendering, with ideal being the default. So you can have it if you want it. IE9+ actually uses it for rendered pages. But a lot of people still don't like the way it looks, and that will go on for as long as we don't actually have those promised high-DPI screens which will render it right.

Re:No OS support.

[shutdown -p now]

Can't Windows just scale the image if the app is not marked as "multiple DPI compatible"? Instead of scaling the text etc, why doesn't Windows just render the image (like a screenshot) and scale that (together with active areas)?

Since Vista, it's precisely how it works - the app has to have a flag in its manifest that basically says "I know what DPI is and will adjust accordingly". Old apps don't have it, since it was added in Vista. If an app doesn't have it, Windows tell it to render at 96 DPI, and then bitmap-scales the output.

It works in a sense that it prevents broken layout, overlapped widgets etc that plagued non-DPI-aware Windows apps running at non-standard settings for a long time. But it still looks crappy, since now you've got those huge oversized logical pixels. And if it's not scaled by a nice whole number - 2x and such - then you have to approximate the scaling, too, which is even worse.

If you want to fit more things on the screen, by a 2550x1440 or 2550x1600 27" or 30" display. 30" is big enough that you actually have to move your hand to focus on different parts of it. So that, we already have, so long as you're willing to pay around $1k. But it would also be nice to have nice, sharp text without hacks like ClearType pixel snapping.

Re:No OS support.

[Kjella]

Why is the 'retina display' 960x640? Because that's exactly twice as many pixels in each dimension as the 3GS's display, so trivial 1->4 pixel scaling wouldn't look like total suck.

Yeah, that's what I hope now, make 3840x2160 display, be able to mark stupid apps so they think they're running on a 1920x1080 display. Sorry application developers, but you as a group isn't up to the task of producing applications that work well over a wide range of DPIs. Apple actually managed to make high DPI applications usable in 1/100th of the time we've been struggling with the same on Windows.

Re:No OS support.

[sound vision]

This is really the only way to do it, for apps that aren't coded in such a way that they're DPI-scaleable. If I may be allowed to wildly speculate, bitmap-based scaling might be a "killer feature" of Windows 8 SP2 -- Or maybe Windows 9 if they give it the Vista treatment and release the next version in quick succession.

Really it just depends on how the market for screens goes. If it stays like it does now (stagnant DPIs) there'll be less of a demand for the scaling feature. If people start using higher DPI screens, it'll be more of a priority for MS. If (a BIG if) MS is successful in creating a single tablet/phone/desktop OS with the Metro UI, tablet screens DPI will become relevant, and we could see scaling in the near future.

Re:No OS support.

[itsdapead]

Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings.

Apple have already started adding support for so-called HiDPI modes (that you can currently enable with a hack) to OS X, which is the source of the rumours that they're going to release double-resolution "retina display" MacBooks real soon now.

They're also in a good position to get applications fixed, since they can dictate standards for admission to the Mac App Store. Although, unlike iOS, you don't have to distribute applications through the App Store, there are plenty of incentives for doing so.

Of course, once hi-def displays become standard, it should be easier to write resolution-independent code and rely on the OS to render things properly, without manually tweaking things to line up with pixels, and use vector-based icons without lovingly hand-optimising them for particular resolutions.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Font hinting is what allows small text to be legible. Microsoft has tried doing antialiased horizontal subpixel positioning twice with VS2010/WPF and IE9, and each time it looked like shit -- great, you've preserved spacing accuracy, at the cost of producing low contrast, blurry text. Mozilla almost went down the same path with Firefox until they tweaked the font code to re-enable pixel snapping for small font sizes. Disabling the hinting wouldn't magically bring us high DPI displays, it would just force everyone to use bigger font sizes and make the screen space problem worse. The high DPI displays need to come first.

Re:No OS support.

[moonbender]

A dead pixel on a high-res display is not as big an issue as on a low-res one, and a dead pixel on a high-dpi display is a smaller issue, still. Almost nobody is going to notice an individual dead pixel on a 250+ ppi display. A stuck-white pixel might be more noticable, not sure how easy they are to see if they're really tiny.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, OS support has to come first. Connect a 23" 4k screen and all your text will be very small unless the OS at least supports zooming (I'm thinking of 4x resolution like Apple is doing).

This is why Apple will lead the way, they control both the OS and the screen.

Re:No OS support.

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple actually managed to make high DPI applications usable in 1/100th of the time we've been struggling with the same on Windows.

Microsoft could do the same, if their platform only had to run a little boutique of apps, and if their customer base was accustomed to having to upgrade everything, all the time, after every OS upgrade.

Re:No OS support.

[Confusador]

If you want to fit more things on the screen, by a 2550x1440 or 2550x1600 27" or 30" display. 30" is big enough that you actually have to move your hand to focus on different parts of it. So that, we already have, so long as you're willing to pay around $1k. But it would also be nice to have nice, sharp text without hacks like ClearType pixel snapping.

You've hit on my problem: I don't really want a 30" monitor, I want to be able to see the whole thing at once, sitting fairly close to it. 23" is my preference, but 25" would be OK. Why* can't I have a 2550x resolution at that size?

*note, this is rhetorical, the whole thread is about why.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't believe this. Apple were pushing resolution independent displays to developers years ago. The support for the hard bits, bit-mapped images, is all there. The displayed model is PDF based.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

After a couple of weeks you get used to those shadows.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Still use my dell re-branded Trinitron daily. Aside from the occasional high pitched electrical squeal when warming up it still runs like a champ.

Re:No OS support.

[arkane1234]

How many apps had problems with the shift from Vista to Windows 7? Or XP to Vista?

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about?
  The framebuffer console can do all resolutions available to the card, and you can choose whatever font you wish.
  Xorg’s RandR has full DPI support (even differing ones for vertical vs horizontal).
  KDE’s UI is fully DPI-independent, with all the symbols being SVG.

Maybe you have just tried toy OSes until now, and confused them with computer operating systems.

Re:No OS support.

[fikx]

So, for the manufacturing problem (higher cost of producing one big screen with no defects vs a smaller screen ) has any companies looked into screens made of tiles? Seems like that would make life easier...if you have dead pixels, have that tile replaced...kid hits your TV with hi wii-mote, replace some tiles....
or is this an engineering impossibility? I know it would take some tricks to get edges to meet smoothly, but I am wondering if it wouldn't be worth some R&D by some company to come up with a version...

Re:No OS support.

[AmiMoJo]

Every app I have tried in Windows 7 works fine at high DPI. If the app doesn't support it the entire window bitmap just gets scaled. Looks a bit blurred but it works fine, no matter how old and hard coded the app is, and the app itself is non-the-wiser.

Re:No OS support.

[IICV]

I spent years - literally, years - without noticing those goddamn shadows on my monitor, but after someone pointed them out to me I could never stop seeing them. I'm just glad LCDs became affordable a couple months after that, I would have gone crazy.

Re:No OS support.

[El Rey]

It's not proper OS support on Windows it's developers who know WTF they are doing. Microsoft told people how to do this in 2001. Few listened.

Microsoft added support to bail out such devs in Vista, but that does fuzz things up a bit...

Re:No OS support.

[El Rey]

Windows already does that since Vista.

Re:No OS support.

[El Rey]

Not sure what you are talking about. I've been doing it correctly since 2001...

Re:No OS support.

[ToasterMonkey]

If we have to wait for "proper" OS support, they'll never come - the OS support won't be fully fixed until there is a demand for it.

Except for all those cases a company named after a fruit managed to show the way to something better? Maybe YOUR OS vendor should "Think Different"? Just saying...

Joking aside, Microsoft can and has lead the way on a great deal of things too, and they still might. One of Apple or Microsoft will move on to push high DPI way before it comes to people jumping up and down screaming with bigass monitors in hand.

Most people don't even know why they want a kick ass new display yet because they haven't been told.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Metro is supposed to fix this though, so you'll probably get your wish.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do this and I'm still at the same company, I might have to suck it up and buy a Mac, then put Linux on it.

Re:No OS support.

[toddestan]

On the other hand, if there's a bad pixel on a cheap $130 low resolution display, many people would be like "oh well". If there's a bad pixel on my $2000 high end display, I'd be pissed.

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple sucks at resolution independence. Why do you think they go with exactly double the resolution when they bumped up the iPhone and the iPad? It's so they wouldn't have to deal with rescaling everything.

Re:No OS support.

[DarwinSurvivor]

So technically nothing, got it.

Re:No OS support.

[otuz]

Those lines weren't really much thicker than the lines between each sub-pixel on current low-res TFT's. It would take a long time to find them, if you weren't looking, and when you found them, they'd be just as obvious as a stuck or dead pixel on a TFT, even if you hadn't noticed it before.

Re:No OS support.

[otuz]

Correct. Typical speckles of dust are a bigger than pixels at 200ppi. Not really an issue and I bet most complainers have large enough dust particles on even their low-res displays covering several pixels at the moment.

Re:No OS support.

[otuz]

I tried it when I installed OS X 10.7 Lion, but went back to the regular mode. I don't want big-ass widgets, I want more workspace. All apps don't support the HiDPI modes, but it doesn't matter, because what they draw is just simply scaled up. Here are two screenshots I took from my setup to illustrate what it looks like and how ready the support was at 10.7.0: http://sorsacode.com/3840x2400_HiDPI.png
Also nicely illustrates the difference between 1920x1200, which is what Safari thinks the resolution is, and 3840x2400 HiDPI, which the other apps on screen supports. However, I just like smaller widgets better, which looks like this: http://sorsacode.com/3840x2400_regular.png
The screen shots are taken on a 22" 3840x2400 VP2290b (rebadged IBM T221) display driven by two single-link heads, hence the menubar split in the middle.

Re:No OS support.

[jaymemaurice]

I have 6x2048x1152 monitors - Samsung, got them for $250 each. They aren't great, but they aren't terrible. For the price they were freaking awesome. Only problem is I can't drive all 6 from the same machine yet and all my Open GL screen savers seem to barf after 4096 pixels wide. I only have 3 hooked up now.

Re:No OS support.

[jaymemaurice]

I have 2xBFG 9800GT passive cooled graphics cards I was thinking of using 2xMatrox tripple head 2 go DP editions to drive 2 sets of 2, then drive two wide and drive the other two native... but I am having a hard time justifying $600+ required for the matrox devices and cable adaptors. 2048 wide is too wide to run 3x2048 :(

Re:No OS support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Them Sony's were awesome, only moved to a LCD once everyone had moved to them and lugging a 32kg monitor to lan's stopped making sense ;). Now its the top of the line Dell IPS displays, but I still miss the +120Mhz 21" monster.

2560x1600?

[gatzke]

What are you talking about? I have been using a 2560x1600 30" for years. It runs 1080p in a little window.

IBM had a super hi-res (3kx2k?) a decade ago, but they pulled it. Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

Re:2560x1600?

[rtaylor]

2560x1600 30" is 100.63dpi. This is exactly what the article writer was complaining about; stagnent DPI.

If that resolution was on a 9" screen then you would have roughly the equivalent DPI as an iPhone.

Re:2560x1600?

[ArcherB]

What are you talking about? I have been using a 2560x1600 30" for years. It runs 1080p in a little window.

IBM had a super hi-res (3kx2k?) a decade ago, but they pulled it. Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

You mean THIS one? It is The (sadly discontinued) 3840×2400, 22-inch IBM T221 -- 204 PPI!

I got the picture from TFA. The description above was the caption of the photo. Rather than looking up the monitor in Wikipedia, you could have just said, "TFA".

Re:2560x1600?

[NormalVisual]

I had the good fortune to see a T221 when they had one on display at Epcot many years back. Still haven't seen anything to match it.

Re:2560x1600?

[atisss]

It's connection information reveals response to TFA. Such resolutions with meaningful refresh rate means at least 3 DVI connectors. You basically can't push more data through wires.

Re:2560x1600?

[Anonymous Coward]

2560x1600 30" is 100.63dpi. This is exactly what the article writer was complaining about; stagnent DPI.

If that resolution was on a 9" screen then you would have roughly the equivalent DPI as an iPhone.

Actually, closer to a 10" screen, a la the iPad 3.

Re:2560x1600?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bog-standard [mini]displayport 1.2 can do 3840x2400@50Hz...

Re:2560x1600?

[gatzke]

The title of the post is about pixel resolution, asking where all the high resolution displays are.

Resolution and pixel density are two different things.

Distance plays a role too. A 9" display at less than a foot from your eyes will be different from a 30" display sitting two feet away. You don't need the same density at longer distances.

Here the TV chart, they don't have detail at the low end. http://hd.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

Where are the 2k and 4k displays? Maybe they are waiting for that resolution since you can just double or quadruple things?

Re:2560x1600?

[gatzke]

You read articles? You must be new here.

I don't think we call them articles anymore, they are slashvertisements. RTFS

Re:2560x1600?

[Twinbee]

If you're sitting back, maybe that's not so bad. I envisage 20000x15000 screens in the future, and if they cover the wall, that could work out at 100dpi, but most people would probably be quite happy with that.

This isn't complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktops and laptops are farther away from your face in typical usage, therefore the dpi can be lower. Also, televisions are usually farther away, which is why the dpi for even hd sets is low if they are large enough.

Re:This isn't complicated

[phluid61]

TFA actually addresses that explicitly. In fact, it's the thrust of the entire article. "As I type this, I’m sitting ~32 inches away from a 27-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080, or 81.59 PPI. At that distance, my monitor would need to pack at least 107 PPI (pixels per inch) in order to qualify as a Retina display."

Re:This isn't complicated

[niftydude]

TFA actually addresses that explicitly. In fact, it's the thrust of the entire article. "As I type this, I’m sitting ~32 inches away from a 27-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080, or 81.59 PPI. At that distance, my monitor would need to pack at least 107 PPI (pixels per inch) in order to qualify as a Retina display."

TFA is whining about nothing. It claims

we need to first acknowledge that higher PPI displays do exist. Newegg stocks multiple 27-inch displays with a 2560×1440 resolution in the $850-$1600 range. At 108 PPI, that’s high enough to qualify as a Retina display at a nominal 32-inch (80cm) viewing distance.

And then he has has a little sad about them being too expensive, but the fact is that you can buy brand new 27-inch 2560x1440 ips displays for around $300 if you are just willing to look around a little.

These give a retina display at the nominal distance he quotes. The dude needs to google around a little more.

Re:This isn't complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA actually addresses that explicitly. In fact, it's the thrust of the entire article. "As I type this, I’m sitting ~32 inches away from a 27-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080, or 81.59 PPI. At that distance, my monitor would need to pack at least 107 PPI (pixels per inch) in order to qualify as a Retina display."

And that "qualification" is done with Apple's conflation of pixels/in. and cycles/in., where a cycle is two pixels: one black, one white. So you really need 200+ppi. As it happens, I have a T221 (204 ppi) and a U2010 (270 ppi), and on both, pixels are visible at 0.5m, but pretty much gone at 1m -- confirming that Apple and all the fools copying them are off by a factor of two.

Re:This isn't complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA actually addresses that explicitly. In fact, it's the thrust of the entire article. "As I type this, I’m sitting ~32 inches away from a 27-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920×1080, or 81.59 PPI. At that distance, my monitor would need to pack at least 107 PPI (pixels per inch) in order to qualify as a Retina display."

And that "qualification" is done with Apple's conflation of pixels/in. and cycles/in., where a cycle is two pixels: one black, one white. So you really need 200+ppi. As it happens, I have a T221 (204 ppi) and a U2010 (270 ppi), and on both, pixels are visible at 0.5m, but pretty much gone at 1m -- confirming that Apple and all the fools copying them are off by a factor of two.

Too bad for your argument that 32 inches are 0.81 meters.

Software support

[boshi]

The reason we don't have easily available high resolution desktop displays is very simple: software support. Current popular operating systems have so many hard-coded UI elements that do not scale easily or reliably that if a 20" 326dpi monitor were available you would not be able to use it with Windows, OSX, or Linux ( maybe linux with massive tweaking ) unless it came with a huge magnifying glass so you could see the UI elements that refuse to scale.

Re:Software support

[brusk]

Chicken-and-egg: if such monitors were cheap and widespread, OS makers would quickly adjust.

Re:Software support

[ChunderDownunder]

Build it and they will come.

There's no incentive for developers to make their software 'scale' if said developers don't themselves have access to high dpi screens on which to test and develop.

Re:Software support

[Microlith]

Such monitors better become available soon. I'm annoyed that my 24" monitor has a fraction of the resolution of the iPad 3.

Re:Software support

[Surt]

Good news: the 4k television standard is going to break this egg by delivering a working chicken, and computers will then promptly figure out how to adjust.

Re:Software support

[Rockoon]

Bad news: There will never be a 4K television standard

Re:Software support

[JDG1980]

Bad news: There will never be a 4K television standard

Sure there will. Having sold us the same films first in DVD and then in HD Blu-Ray, the only remaining step for the studios (aside from crappy 3D conversions that few are buying) is to sell them again in 4K. There are currently talks between Sony and other studios and manufacturers to come up with a 4K Blu-Ray specification.

Re:Software support

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Sure there will. I can even tell you exactly when. Febuary 23rd at 5:44am during the year of the linux desktop.

Re:Software support

[atisss]

Just use GTK+ and it will scale

Re:Software support

[Johann Lau]

It works great for websites though: make all dimensions (font-sizes, borders widths, padding etc.) relative to the font-size, then scale the font size of the document by using media queries triggered by screen widths -- use .svg for icons, done! The higher your resolution is, the nicer it looks.

So why can't GUI toolkits have units that are relative to viewport and window size? Not saying they don't have those "somewhere in there", but they obviously aren't used if they exist. So why can't they "just" allow user configuration of what a "legacy pixel" is, and *force* legacy apps to use relative units instead? As another benefit, this would allow you to scale all apps, or each individually, depending on usage, monitor and eyesight quality.

Anyone remember stuff like "Magic User Interface" on the Amiga, which made everything nice and pretty, in a super configurable way, by hooking into system calls for GUI widgets? It still had pixels but those were different times, the principle would be the same, and maybe even old windows apps could be retrofitted that way, even more so Qt or GTK. Just hook into everything before it draws.

I won't claim it would be trivial, but come on, you know you want this...

Re:Software support

[Surt]

There already is one.

Re:Software support

[toddestan]

Why not? They need to come up with something to get everyone to buy new TVs all over again, and this whole 3D thing isn't working out.

It's because of LCD TV's

[Anonymous Coward]

Manufacturers took the easy way out and consolidated everything based on TV specs.

My 10+ year old LCD monitors are better than what you can buy today. I have four 1600x1200 20" monitors and my laptop from 2002 has a 15" 1600x1200 screen. Think about that ten year old laptop screen, it's 130 DPI. Where is my 24" 130 DPI screen?

We had the technology and it was lost due to stupidity.

Re:It's because of LCD TV's

[Mashiki]

Probably truer than anything else, since there's only 3-4 panel makers in the world these days. Then again about the time CRT was on the way out you were able to get 0.10 which was pretty nice. My old 22" Phillips 0.12 still looks crisper than my current Samsung E2220.

Re:It's because of LCD TV's

[Lawrence_Bird]

This is *exactly* why we are stuck where we are. As LCD/LED flat panels took over the TV market they were geared for native TV resolutions. All that other crap in the article is just that, crap. Development of hi-res consumer displays effectively ended. The great hope now is the adoptoin of that ultra hdtv standard will force a move to a native resolution of 7,680 × 4,320, as much as I despise the 16:9 format for anything other than movies/tv.

IBM T221 @ 3840 x 2400 From 2001 - 2006

[Anonymous Coward]

They still don't build them like they used to, but then again when I show off my T221, most people don't care; they won't pay for the quality. That's just reality.

Dell inspirons

[Anonymous Coward]

Find an old P3-class Inspiron 8x00, 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD... seems newer is not always better

Re:Dell inspirons

[akeeneye]

I've got 1900x1200 on my Inspiron 6400. I'll do everything I can to keep this thing alive, put up with the speed and lack of memory, just to have this native resolution. I code, and vertical resolution is very important.

Re:Dell inspirons

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a rotatable HD flip it sideways and rotate the desktop in windows settings.

Re:Dell inspirons

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Dell's native resolution can suck my Lenovo's 2048x1536 dick.

(Seriously, if vertical is important, get yourself a 15" 4:3 T60 (or similar) and the parts for a screen upgrade, they're not making 'em anymore. If you wait till your Inspiron dies, they're gonna be real hard to find. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_a_QXGA_display_in_a_R/T60_or_61)

Re:Dell inspirons

[akeeneye]

You got the dick option? I could only afford a dongle though later I bought a USB extender for it but it didn't do anything. That sounds like serious surgery on the T60, and in the end you'll have a machine with a monster LCD(ick) but with a weakling physique behind it. I'm not sure that will impress the ladies though you can never tell with them. This panel I got was a drop-in replacement for the original WSXGA+ panel that I wrecked. No, when this dies I'll probably replace it with one of the the 32-core, 64G machines they're pushing then, or whatever's at the sweet spot of the price/perf curve, and put up with the shitty 1920x1080 display or whatever fucked-up resolution the The Market dictates at the time.

Re:Dell inspirons

[damnbunni]

How the hell do you type on a laptop standing on its side?

Re:Dell inspirons

[chrisxcr1]

He's saying a screen at 1920 x 1200 gives you more real estate in the vertical dimension than a 1920 x 1080 screen.

Re:Dell inspirons

[Anonymous Coward]

with a USB keyboard.

You can get 4096x2160

[Shag]

The DuraVision FDH3601 from EIZO is one example.

Expect to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it, though - these are targeted at oil companies and government.

Conveniently, the latest Intel chipsets can apparently handle such "4K" resolutions.

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[Pandur77]

Apparently Nvidia's 670/680/690 Geforce cards also support 4Kx2K output through the DisplayPort output. At least that's what it say on the box, I don't have a 4Kx2K display available to test it.

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you don't bother with puny details like 'color' you can go a bit higher still...

Don't expect much change from $30k, though...

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[QQBoss]

I won't complain about 127 DPI on a 92cm diagonal monitor (if you sold me one for a price I could afford). If they had even 1/2 the DPI of the iPhone, though, it would only be a ~64cm diagonal monitor and I would have a lot better chance of being able to afford it- assuming screen real estate is more expensive than more drivers in a smaller space.

Given the usage model of a computer monitor versus a smart phone, 1/2 the DPI of an iPhone seems quite reasonable to me (at least until next year).

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[rthille]

That would be awesome. Best coding monitor I've used was my monochrome NeXT monitor...

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[Ed Avis]

4096x2560... not bad at all. It doesn't beat two rotated T221s side by side (total res 4800x3840) but there isn't a 10cm bezel in the middle. OTOH, the T221s have colour.

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[Anonymous Coward]

I like their ads. "If you have to ask; you can't afford it."

Re:You can get 4096x2160

[Shag]

"...an optimal replacement for traditional dual head 5 megapixel monitor installations."

Ah yes, the traditional dual head 5 megapixel monitor installation that your grandparents all have...

cost?

[pbjones]

sure you can build a 10" display with mega dpi, but imagine the hardware required to drive a 20" or 30" version, 4 or 9 times the VRAM and bandwidth. Not to mention the manufacturing issues associated with producing zero dead pixels at high dpi values on large display panels.

Re:cost?

[White Flame]

That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.

Re:cost?

[Pentium100]

Yes, that's what's best about LCD displays - the quality of the scaled image. Right...

So, all the new interfaces can't do much better than the good old analog VGA? LCDs don't even need to be refreshed as often (85Hz for a CRT is recommended), so even the analog cable should be able to drive the monitor (after all, it can drive the CRT at 1920x1200@85Hz, so a lower refresh rate would mean higher resolution).

Re:cost?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That's why we need dirty-rectangle updates, instead of this retarded continually full-refresh holdover from CRTs. For games and movies, the monitor should do the full-screen scaling, thus not needing some uber-bandwidth sci-fi connector.

But we already do have the uber-bandwidth connectors, they aren't sci-fi.
DisplayPort 1.2 can handle 3840x2160@60Hz with 30 bits-per-pixel. The spec was finalized at the end of 2009.

Re:cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point of having all those pixels if you can't animate at full resolution? You couldn't even scroll a fullscreen webpage. Tracking fast-scrolling text is already difficult enough without it going blurry on you.

Re:cost?

[AmiMoJo]

Quad HD video is 3840Ã--2160 at 60 FPS at up to 30 bits per pixel, and works just fine over HDMI or DVI.

There is little point implementing a complex rectangle update system that will be ditched the moment you want to display full screen video (people will want to do software upscaling for quality so having it built into the monitor is pointless). The amount of memory bandwidth used by the screen update is actually tiny compared to what is needed to render 3D games, so really there is no problem at all with these high resolutions.

Re:cost?

[Carewolf]

But we already do have the uber-bandwidth connectors, they aren't sci-fi.

They are no were near sci-fi. Going retro to VGA cables (Sub-D I think they are called), they support any resolution at any refresh rate, though you need either short distances or very thick cables to pull it off, but seriously, they exists and it does work, it is was used to be used for these high-res display before everybody started going low-res.

Re:cost?

[sylvandb]

LG has a 5" 1080p display. 4 of those tiled would be a pretty nice 10" display. Then 4 of those (16 of the 5" ones) tiles for a 20"... Yup, VRAM and bandwidth quickly become significant!

Re:cost?

[otuz]

Not any resolution at any refresh rate. VGA is limited by the display adapter's DAC's speed, which varies from one display adapter to another. Likewise, there are no limits on resolution on DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort either, the limit is in the bandwidth, and there are variation there too. Also, to nitpick, VGA is strictly speaking just 640x480@60Hz. What you are speaking of are nonstandard, hot-rodded VGA signals, something the spec was never intended to drive and the signal is transferred lossy, whereas the digital interfaces are lossless.

Re:cost?

[Carewolf]

Well, the cable is not really called VGA, it is called D-Sub I think. It is just commonly referred to as a VGA-cable. It has the advantage that it can drive any bandwidth, it just needs to be thicker or shorter to do so with signal loss. It is true about DACs, but you easily get a good DAC by buying high-end graphics card (which you need anyway for games at that res), or for desktop use a few year old high-end graphics card which can be very cheap because it is no longer fast enough for games, but the DAC on it doesn't get outdated that fast :)

Re:cost?

[otuz]

You can likewise get "any" bandwidth from any other connector too, but without the lossiness of the analog signal. The "VGA" signal itself is just really analog RGB with h/vsync and optional EDID information. Nothing specific about that either. There are also hard limits on what you can push through a setup like that. Definitely less information in most cases than on the more modern digital video buses. A spec defines only the minimum a specification-compatible device should support, just like in the case of VGA, every VGA card should be able to output at least 640x480@60Hz, just like a single-link DVI should be able to drive at least 1920x1200@60Hz, but there are really no limits on that design either, it's just up to cabling there too before the signal-to-noise ratio becomes too bad. HDMI itself is practically the same as DVI, but with added encryption and audio signals. Newer-spec HDMI ports can be still used as "over-spec" clocked single-link DVI ports with just passive adapters that wire one type of connector to another, which is useful for monitors like the IBM T221, which supports much higher bandwidths than regular single-link DVI can provide, but older versions of it didn't support dual-link DVI either, because it wasn't specified yet back then.

D-Sub itself doesn't mean anything specific. It's just a short for "D-subminiature" type of of connector. In the case of VGA is the horribly designed connector with 15 pins crammed in the footprint where a typical D-connector would have 9 pins (like on rs232 com-ports on legacy PC's and atari joystick ports). If you want to call the connector something, at least use the full name, D-sub-15, because there are all kinds of pin counts for D-sub connectors as well as regular D-connectors. A dense setup worsens the signal quality somewhat due to cross-talk (results in ghosting on the screen) and makes the connector itself weaker than in would otherwise be. It's not rare to get an occasional bent pin on the connector, because it doesn't really take any effort. Regular D15 connectors were used on at least the old-school Macs for their RGB output. Other systems used other connectors, ranging from some really exotic ones to just plain multiple BNC connectors. On legacy PC's the same regular D15 connector type was common for the (analog) joystick port.

Focus Circle

[Anna Merikin]

A pad or phone is usually held closer to the eye than a screen on a laptop or desktop is placed. At normal distances, (say, two feet) a 20-inch 1080x1920 monitor's dot pitch is barely visible. A 5-inch monitor held 6-inches from the eye will need exactly the same resolution to appear as clear.

On the larger end, the lack of computer sales volume seems to have led manufacturers to limit cheaper large-screen offerings to HD -sized playback; one can still find professional large-screen monitors with enormous resolutions for photo- and video editing at very high prices. ,

Re:Focus Circle

[Anonymous Coward]

A pad or phone is usually held closer to the eye than a screen on a laptop or desktop is placed. At normal distances, (say, two feet) a 20-inch 1080x1920 monitor's dot pitch is barely visible.

Even if you can't see the pixels at your viewing distance, all modern screens (even e-reader screens) today have to low resolution to be good for viewing text or other graphics that depend on fine details. The pixels might not be visible to the eye, but the low resolution still create a lack of detail and make everything look like crap. Fonts with shapes adapted to viewing at computer screens, anti-aliasing and hinting is really bad hacks, that makes reading on moderns screens just barely possible (unless you limit yourself to bitmap fonts, especially made for your screen resolution, then you don't need anti-aliasing and hinting), but all those adoptions make everything look even more butt-ugly.

Sadly all the computer screens manufactured nowadays make me long for the 300-400ppi monochrome screens of the early 1980's (The ones I've used was Scandinavian or German made, so I guess they where not much used in the US; US-made computers didn't have the graphics hardware to support them anyhow, and the computers that they were intended to be used with, was manufactured at such small scale (and also highly localised, language wise) that they where rarely exported outside Northern Europe).

Re:Focus Circle

[Anonymous Coward]

Try turning the antialiasing off on your fonts and tell me whether pixel pitch is still "barely visible".

Inform yourself before commenting next time.

Re:Focus Circle

[Anna Merikin]

I am a photographer, using my monitor for graphical work. I cannot see pixels at 30-inches distance ON IMAGES.

I do not judge monitors on their display of text. Do you?

Re:Focus Circle

[otuz]

I do. Photographic images are antialiased by default. Try switching off line-drawing images and suddenly you'll require at least 400-600ppi at regular viewing distances to make the pixels "barely visible". Same for text, which is technically a bunch of line-drawn glyphs. I'm using a 200ppi monitor here and I still need anti-aliasing to make pixels "barely visible".

Patentocracy

[girlintraining]

why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."

Doesn't matter. In this country, like many others who have adopted the principle of "intellectual property", technological progress is constrained by the length of time it takes for patents to expire, and the willingness of any new entrants into the market to bear the excessive legal costs of fighting off legal attacks based on patents. In other words, even if the technology became available tomorrow, and had all of the prerequisites met for low cost, high yield industrial processing... it would not enter the market for several years while the incumbent market players played out all possible legal scenarios. At least in the United States, the appeals process is nearly limitless. in Europe, the European Union provides a similar capacity for limitless administrative delay.

Re:Patentocracy

[Kijori]

Can you explain this a little more please? It sounds like you're saying that patents completely stifle innovation while they are in force - but that would mean claiming that there are popular and in-demand technologies that have stood still for 20 years. I'm sure that's not what you mean but it would be helpful if you could be a little more explicit.

You also address the dissuasive impact of potential legal costs on new entrants into a market. What you don't mention though is the inducement provided by patents allowing an inventor to make a profit from his invention without having to compete with 'copycats' that don't have to recoup their R&D expenditure. To take an example from the technology sector, Intel have spent $32.2 billion on R&D in the last 5 years. One wonders how much they would have been willing to spend if they had known that AMD or IBM could copy their innovations.

Re:Patentocracy

[girlintraining]

What I mean is the rate of technological progress is constrained by the length of time before a patent expires. Existing technology can't be improved upon and new technology won't have a competitive price (lower prices = greater demand). The only alternatives then is to come up with another method to achieve the same effect (research), wait for the time to run out on the patent, engage in a legal battle which may or may not invalidate the patent, or license the patent. In an ideal capitalist economy, the cost of licensing the patent would be equal to or less than the cost of any of the other options. In practice, this rarely occurs.

The problem is that the duration of the patent is fixed, and since most science and technology is built on previous innovation, the rate of advancement is constrained by the length of the patent. This only becomes a problem when the capacity for advancement for an equal period of time exceeds the period of time the patent exists. In the automotive industry, for example, this is not a big problem. In information technology, it is a massive problem that has gutted the industry for the past decade -- we hit the artificial limit sometime around 2000--2002. Ever since then, progress has become a straight line with advances occuring on a predictable (if slow) time table.

As Always... Money

[theshowmecanuck]

If they created monitors that had a resolution high enough that the eye couldn't register any further improvement, then the manufacturers wouldn't have anywhere else to go from there. Once you're at the top, you're at the top. And then the prices would start to come down as the market became saturated. But now they can make up some bullshit marketing ploy that really doesn't do much in terms of improved resolution, and jack the price up whenever a "generation" of displays starts losing market value.

It's easy

[fredgiblet]

1. It's a lot more expensive 2. The vast majority of people won't notice, at all.

dynamic range?

[phluid61]

What about bit depth? A bazillion pixels is all well and good, but I still find it frustrating that those pixels are limited to 256 grey levels. What would it take to bump displays up an extra couple of bits per channel? Or even doubling them? I think the visual improvement from HDR would trump that of higher pixel density, at least in the things that matter to me (games and movies).

Re:dynamic range?

[White Flame]

I'm not sure this means what you think it means. HDR is a *scanning* feature, not a display feature, the benefit being that you can extract very minute intensity transitions and expand them out clearly.

You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated). Also, if monitors got backlights twice as bright, and blacks significantly darker, that would exaggerate the range and require more levels of control. Neither of these cases are quite likely, nor are they IMO as important as getting past the commonplace 1080p "barrier".

Re:dynamic range?

[Chirs]

You'd only need HDR in a physical display if you can regularly see the banding between consecutive shades of those 256 levels on the display (and if you can, your display is most likely not calibrated).

Are you kidding? I would love an HDR display. Imagine being able to truly recreate the dynamic range present in an outside scene with the sun visible as well as shadows--with full detail in both. A sunny day has a contrast ratio of something like 100000:1.

Re:dynamic range?

[soramimicake]

Dell's U2711 & U3011 does 10 bit per channel, but I think you need a professional-class display card (i.e. Quadro / FireGL) to drive it that way.

Re:dynamic range?

[White Flame]

Then you should have quoted the sentence after the one you did. ;-)

Re:dynamic range?

[jones_supa]

What about bit depth? A bazillion pixels is all well and good, but I still find it frustrating that those pixels are limited to 256 grey levels.

And even then you have a lot of panels on the market which only have 6 bits per channel.

Re:dynamic range?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love an HDR display. Imagine being able to truly recreate the dynamic range present in an outside scene with the sun visible as well as shadows--with full detail in both.

That would suck. "Do not stare at picture of sun with remaining eye."

Re:dynamic range?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Can I assume that the 100000 in that ratio is "looking directly into the sun"? Do you have any idea how much POWER that would draw? Not to mention the insanity of requiring sunglasses to look at your computer...

Re:dynamic range?

[ChrisMaple]

100,000:1 is 16.6 bits. That's roughly the range between white in the sunshine and black flocking in deep shade. Specular reflections and the sun add another 13 bits or so.

Because nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, just because Apple is doing something, everyone starts to think it's a necessity. Can you see the pixels on your 1080p screen? No? THEN WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NEED MORE DPI?!

Fucking trendwhores.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Surt]

Can you really not see the pixels? I suspect something to be wrong with your eyes.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Vegemeister]

Can you see the pixels on your 1080p screen?

Yes?

Re:Because nobody cares?

[QQBoss]

English characters on a 1080p screen at a reasonable distance for the usage model aren't too bad (ex. 23" diagonal @ arms length or a bit further, 12-14 point fonts). Many Chinese characters are still jaggy as hell to me at similar font sizes, though. Age has taken away my post-lasik 20/15 vision, so I don't think I am a corner case. Maybe it is time for a touch-up job.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

English characters in 12-14 point 72 DPI fonts are legible, but I wouldn't classify them as "not jaggy". And if you want to see proper font shapes instead of shapes forced onto a pixel grid, or readable subscripts and superscripts, you need more DPI. Not to mention that with a high-DPI screen we could get rid of the fuzzy off-grey edges around characters that result from antialising tricks like cleartype.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[QQBoss]

And I wouldn't classify a 23" 1080p monitor as having 72dpi. My particular monitor is 51 cm across yielding ~95dpi. Most desktop monitors today are in the 100dpi realm (+/-10 dpi; anyone who would buy a 27" 1080p monitor to use at normal desktop monitor distances probably isn't very picky about jaggies, for sure, but at greater than 90-100 cm viewing distances they can be quite nice). At 100 dpi, English characters are legible and not jaggy at the specs I previously mentioned (super- and subscripts of 12-14 point fonts aren't typically 12-14 point fonts so they don't count, though the anti-aliasing grey edges are plainly there for many people on 12-14 point fonts for black on white text, I suspect).

Would more be better? Yes, but not so much for English characters. All the people who use ideographs or more curvy character sets would appreciate it a lot, though, not to mention all the non-character based usages.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would probably be better to talk about pixel sizes: fonts that are 12 to 14 pixels high look jaggy, but I can agree that a font 18-19 pixels high (14 points on a 95 dpi screen) is acceptable. Still, even at that size the typography is fairly limited by the pixel grid. At that size you can just fit a Letter or A4 page on a 1080p screen. Now, if you write text that needs subscripts and superscripts, you have the choice of either fuzzy, jaggy sub/superscript text, or showing only a part of the page at a time. But it is true that on the grand scale of things this is surely a lesser annoyance than that faced by users of ideographic languages.

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the AC is right. If he can't see the pixels, no need for more DPI. In fact, no need for a screen at all. :-P

Re:Because nobody cares?

[DarwinSurvivor]

Can you see the pixels on your 1080p screen?

I use a 1080p 23" display on a regular basis (from about 1.5' away). I have font-aliasing disable when browsing and can most DEFINITELY see the individual pixels. In fact, periods are exactly 1x1 pixel and they are VERY easy to see. If you can't a 1x1 pixel dot on a 1080p screen then you need to get your glasses prescription updated!

Re:Because nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not that disturbing. It is good enough. Therefor there is not much need to improve it. More important are new gadgets and their integration. Really working bluetooth, touch screens, long running hardware (low energy consumption) are more important. Increasing screen resolution will increase energy consumption, therefor you only will do something there, when the rest is at its best or at least no longer such a pressing need.

Meh

[bhcompy]

I don't care about DPI, I care about resolution. Laptop standards have degraded. A high powered laptop now has a 1920x1080 screen where as 18 months ago they has 1920x1200. Lovely downgrade. Hurray progress?

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

How about 15" laptops at 1366x768? You'll find them when shopping around. I wish I was kidding.

Re:Meh

[Dynedain]

DPI is resolution.

Dots Per Inch = resolution quality, aka, how refined and precise the display is.

What you care about is the total number of pixels on the screen.

Re:Meh

[camperdave]

Dots per inch or dots per screen. They are both resolution, just two different ways of measuring it.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Dots per inch or dots per screen. They are both resolution, just two different ways of measuring it.

Say what?

If I have a 1 DPI screen that is a 5 feet square then that is 60x60 pixels (3600 "dots per screen"). If I say I have a 60x60 pixel screen that is a 10 feet square then I have a DPI of 0.5. If I say I have a screen that is 800x600 but don't tell you the size in inches or centimeters then the number is meaningless in terms of resolution (DPI is impossible to calculate without the physical dimensions as well as the pixel count).

Saying the pixel size of the screen is the resolution only works when the size is known, 800x600 is a valid way to describe the resolution if we already know that the screen is 8 inches but "800x600" without the size is meaningless since 800x600 on 20 inches is a way worse resolution (DPI) than the exact same pixel count on an 8 inch screen.

Re:Meh

[DarwinSurvivor]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolution disagrees (scroll down to "Computing Resolution")

Re:Meh

[StripedCow]

Well, I care about contrast. Where are all the HDR displays?

Re:Meh

[Dynedain]

And read just a few lines above it...

The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal.

Total screen display area in pixels is a layman's misunderstanding of the term that's been populated, and is driven partly by the fact that the computer itself didn't know the physical display size of the monitor.

Why do we even still call it DPI in our software when rendering for on-screen use? It has nothing to do with actual physical space.

Re:Meh

[DarwinSurvivor]

I did a fair bit of searching (including online dictionaries and encyclopedias which tend to use the *correct* definitions) and didn't find a SINGLE one that said resolution is pixel density (DPI). Every single one stated it was the total on-screen pixels.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

..forgot to use mycleanpc did we?

IBM T221

[White Flame]

That might have been high dpi, but the resolution was nothing special. In 2001 IBM blew that out of the water @ 204dpi covering a full 22", and nothing sine has come close. It's the only piece of computer hardware where "I wish they made 'em like they used to" comes to mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T221

Re:IBM T221

[Jason Smith]

Hear, hear. A colleague at IBM Research had one of these on his desk, and it was nothing short of phenomenal.

Re:IBM T221

[Trouvist]

We bought out the last 15 from IBM's stockpile a few years ago and now everyone at the office is using one. It's spectacular.

Re:IBM T221

[White Flame]

I have 2 of them on my desk. :) They're regularly available on eBay, often refurbished.

Re:IBM T221

[mosb1000]

I hear Apple may be releasing a higher resolution monitor on monday. We'll see. . .

Re:IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear it won't have higher density than my T221, but iTards will eat it up anyway.

Re:IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the only piece of computer hardware where "I wish they made 'em like they used to" comes to mind.

There's also keyboards. At least it's not hard to find them online in the $50-200 range, but about everything you find in brick-and-mortar is crap. Even the flashy expensive "gamer" stuff is usually crap.

I swear, if people knew how better mechanical keyboards are, they'd never buy rubber domes again.

Re:IBM T221

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The idiot who modded this up didn't look up the price.

Re:IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

Psst, nobody used the word invent.

Re:IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

Price? about $1k used. They're not made any more, so the 5-digit new price you're thinking of is irrelevant.

Plus, someone dropping an Apple rumor in a thread about real high resolution monitor and saying "higher resolution" (meaning higher than ordinary displays, not higher than T221s) deserves a smackdown regardless of price -- kudos, GP.

Re:IBM T221

[arth1]

I order Cherry keyboards. No, not gamer keyboards with Cherry caps, but keyboards entirely made by Cherry.

One recent problem with keyboards is that newer PCs tend to not have a PS/2 port. And USB is a huge step down - you won't get N-key rollover, it doesn't have a dedicated interrupt, and it has to be parsed by the OS or BIOS compatibility layer, so "hard" keys like SysRq won't work...

Back to monitors, I still use a 1600x1200 as my main home monitor. I don't want anything less in either direction, nor anything bigger than a 19" because I like sitting fairly close to displays.

My secondary monitor is a quality CRT which does even higher resolutions, but its main strength is colour correctness. Combined with a 7-color printer, it gives far better results than even high priced LCDs with a higher gamut do.

Ten years ago, we had 2560x1920 monitors. Can't we get back there again?

Re:IBM T221

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Sorry, but it is relevent for the very reason you mentioned: They're not made anymore. The price-point remains a BFD.

Re:IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

so the price you could buy it at if you had a time machine is relevant.
the price you can buy it at today isn't.

got it.

and you still don't address why saying "higher resolution" when not meaning it --

Re:IBM T221

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

so the price you could buy it at if you had a time machine is relevant.
the price you can buy it at today isn't.

Since they are not new anymore... YES.

and you still don't address why saying "higher resolution" when not meaning it --

I don't have a dispute with that comment. I could point out that there's a rumor of the 27" iMac getting 5,000 pixels horizontally, but I don't believe that rumor.

It was the 'iTards will eat it up' comment I was responding to, really. A mass market monitor running at resolutions like that, priced in the neighborhood of $2,000, wouldn't be successful just because a bunch of tards want it.

Re:IBM T221

[arkane1234]

You'll have to excuse the GP, he has a little "my shit is all that's needed" syndrome.
He doesn't realize that some people own more expensive cars/etc, not to have something that meets needs, but because they like it.

Example for GP: Plasma TV buyers in 2000, portable DVD players in 1999.. lots of other examples.

Re:IBM T221

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I read that differently. I thought he was saying that the Apple monitor (which never materialized...) would only be successful because only Apple fans trying to show off to other people would buy them. I don't think he got the whole "It would be successful because it actually does meet certain needs..." idea.

Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Things are about to change. In a couple of days, Apple will refresh all of their laptop and desktop machines with Retina displays. Once they do this, it won't be long before PC manufacturers start moving to higher-res displays, in order to keep up. Exactly the same happened with the MacBook Air and Intel's Ultrabook initiative.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

And thank fucking god. As usual, Apple has to step in and raise the bar. God forbid some other company did anything. We'd be stuck with 1920x1080 and 1366x768 til the end of times if not for Apple doing what we expect them to do at WWDC.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Lot's of people would have done this a long time ago but they were afraid they would get sued by Apple.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I mean, current computer displays are un-fucking-readable. My eyeballs are bleeding without retina displays. I can't even read what I'm typing right now because the display is so piss-poor.

Re:Not For Long

[jones_supa]

It would be ridiculous to be sued just for having a certain DPI in your display.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, we're already seeing it. The refresh of the MBA clone from ASUS UX21a will have 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS.

I think one of the main issues with higher DPI is problems with font scaling, especially in Windows applications. Fonts scale some places, but not others, don't fit in static sized boxes, etc.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of USB. Microsoft and Intel spent considerable time implementing USB and forcing it on PCs.

It was a nice standard, replacing serial, parallel and PS2 ports in one hot-swappable daisy-chainable standard.

No one gave a shit; no one owned a USB device.

A few years later, Apple released the iMac and new Mac laptops, ripping out all the legacy ports and even the floppy. It was USB or nothing.

And only then did the USB market emerge - for both Apple and the PC marketplace.

Re:Not For Long

[lexman098]

I think what you mean is: As usual, people have to step in and pay more to get higher quality.

Apple leads the way in these things because they've managed to convince people to spend more for higher quality.

Here, buy this if you want greater resolution. Add in a really nice computer and it's still cheaper than an iMac with the same screen size and density.

Re:Not For Long

[PyroMosh]

Maybe your theory will prove true, but I don't think it has in the recent past.

Where are the high DPI Android tablets that came out to keep up with the iPad?

There are a half dozen or so Android and Symbian phones with resolutions higher than the latest iPhone. And many more with lower, but comparable resolutions.

But all I've seen so far on the tablet front is talk. Microsoft says Windows 8 devices will support crazy high resolutions, which is nice, I guess. Samsung shows off a prototype panel. That's about it.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that other companies DID step up a loong time ago. Just switch off your reality distortion field for once in your lifetime, and look around for the many links to such displays on this very page.

It's just that Apple fanbois are the only ones crazy enough to shell out the ten bazillion dollars they cost at the first release. Especially with the amount of them out there to which an Apple presentation is such a <voice pitch="earthquake-bass" echo="over-9000">COMMANDMENT FROM GOD<voice>, that one can rely on big sales volume, and hence do bigger production volumes, which drive down the price from the ten fantastillion it did cost before.

Re:Not For Long

[AmiMoJo]

It would be ridiculous to be sued for having rounded corners.

Re:Not For Long

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd be stuck with 1920x1080 and 1366x768 til the end of times if not for Apple doing what we expect them to do at WWDC.

The 11/13 inch mac laptops *ARE* the reasons we have been stuck with 1366x768 since forever and a day.

Re:Not For Long

[oxdas]

Others are waiting for high res OLED displays to be ready I suspect. Apple decided not to wait and for the iPad3 went with an LED backlit display, but companies like Samsung are not going to follow suit until OLED has matured. That and Samsung has sunk a fortune into OLED and see it as the future.

FYI, Apple has applied for a number of patents on drivers and such for OLED displays this year. It looks like they are considering moving in that direction as well.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Vegemeister]

It's confidante!!!1!1!

Re:Good enough

[Fjandr]

8 brazillian DPI is a marketing ploy

Anything kinky is a marketing ploy, but they're effective ploys. Lots of people will buy the video.

Oh, wait...

Ask Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would you want a high resolution display?

Everyone knows 100ppi is the optimum resolution for both text and images

Re:Good enough

[White Flame]

That is only true for watching full-screen images, like movies or games. Put desktop applications on there, and the extra elbow room you get from more pixels in the same area running in high density is a great reward.

Real 4k

[White Flame]

It's nice to see a "4k" display that's actually 4096 pixels across. That term is unfortunately also used for 4x 1080p, or 3840x2160.

Apple and new TV developments offer hope

[JDG1980]

As I've suggested before, the existence of ill-behaved applications is one major reason why we don't have high-DPI monitors. (And as others have pointed out, the low cost of 1080p TV panels is another.) Windows 7 scales DPI pretty well, but some applications go out of their way to break it.

There have been strong rumors for a while that Apple is preparing a Retina Display for the new MacBook Pro. If they keep the price point to $999 (and they did a good job of maintaining existing price points on the new iPad), it might be a good deal even for those of us who don't care for OSX – just blow off the default image and install Windows 7. The ultrabook market, like the tablet market, is one area where Apple is actually competitive in price.

Also, at the most recent consumer electronics shows, many TV manufacturers have demonstrated quad-HD (3840x2160) sets. While these will be very expensive at first, they will be heavily pushed as the next big thing, and prices will go down to reasonable levels eventually. I currently use a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor; it works great, but you can see a tiny bit of pixelation if you lean in close. A Quad HD 32" TV would be a retina display in all but name.

Re:Apple and new TV developments offer hope

[fredgiblet]

While these will be very expensive at first, they will be heavily pushed as the next big thing

So was 3D, I suspect the new standard will fail. Most people won't see the difference, the screens will be very expensive and with the switch to streaming the bandwidth requirements will be sky-high and unusable for many people.

Re:A tad longer than that

[fredgiblet]

Not me. I'd rather have current resolution and anti-aliasing than a slightly higher resolution. Also I like not needing to have Quad-SLI to run last-gen games at low settings.

I'm currently running a 19" monitor at 1440x900, when the next-gen graphics cards come out I'll probably upgrade to 1920x1200 (or 1080 if I have to) in the 20-22" range, and that will be good enough for me.

Re:Good enough

[oldhack]

1920x1080 is good enough unless you're using a 40 inch screen. Deal.

You're old and blind. Most likely senile, too.

Deal.

Re:Good enough

[NormalVisual]

Those of us that have better- than-average vision beg to differ.

Maybe hope but not Affordable

[bogie]

"Apple is preparing a Retina Display for the new MacBook Pro. If they keep the price point to $999"

A) the cheapest Macbook Pro is currectly $1200, and now they are going to be adding a super advanced low produce screen that no other manu is using.

B) expect the Retina Macbooks to be in the $2000-2500 range.

Re:Maybe hope but not Affordable

[Sponge Bath]

B) expect the Retina Macbooks to be in the $2000-2500 range.

From a leaked price list of new part numbers referenced to expected models, it looks like the 13" will be US$1199, 15" will be US$1799. Go to apple insider.com for details.

Less necessary

[nine-times]

I'd like to see high resolution displays as much as the next guy, but it's much less necessary on desktop displays and television sets.

I'm sure someone will freak out about me saying that, but here's the thing: it's not just about DPI, but about the viewing distance. The reason the retina display is called "retina" is that (we can argue about the validity of the claim, but...) it's roughly the maximum resolution discernible by the human eye at the distance you're expected to view a smartphone. That is, approximately a foot away from your eyes.

Your desktop display should be about 3 feet from your eyes. My TV at home sits... I don't know, somewhere around 12 feet from my eyes. Though it might be really cool to get a 300 dpi television, I'm not sure it makes sense to worry about it when you're talking about a television that's 12 feet away.

Re:Less necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

at the distance you're expected to view a smartphone. That is, approximately a foot away from your eyes.

If you're viewing a smartphone at a distance of one foot... you need glasses.

Most people that I see hold the phone at arm's length, or on their lap when sitting.

Re:Less necessary

[jensen404]

Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low? I don't see why you shouldn't use a desktop monitor at 18-24". I use a Cintiq (Wacom pen enabled display) at work, and the pixels on it are huge at normal working distance. Any screen you can interact with directly through touch or a digitizing pen can easily benefit from a 200+ PPI screen.

Re:Less necessary

[itsdapead]

Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?

I'd say its because its more comfortable to focus on something 3 feet away. That's also why I got a 32" telly pre-HD TV - so that I could watch it from the other end of the room.

I use a Cintiq (Wacom pen enabled display) at work, and the pixels on it are huge at normal working distance. Any screen you can interact with directly through touch or a digitizing pen can easily benefit from a 200+ PPI screen.

The Cintiq would be an ideal candidate for a super-high-resolution display - but it is designed to be used close-up. That's also why it makes sense to have super-high-res displays in tablets like the iPad.

Super-higher-res monitors are less necessary if you're going to use them as desktop monitors. My beef with 1080p is more about the aspect ratio and real estate for a given width (i.e. desk space) than the resolution.

Re:Less necessary

[nine-times]

Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?

No, that's just my estimate based on sitting properly in a chair (not all slouched over) with a keyboard in front of you and a display in front of that. Maybe it's not quite 3 feet, but 2.5 feet, but it's not 1 foot. I think if 2 feet is going to be a little cramped and include bad ergonomic practices.

Now doesn't get me wrong, a high DPI screen would be cool and I'd rather have it. A screen like the Wacom Critiq would benefit from higher DPI because you aren't using it as a normal desktop display. I'm just pointing out that there's less of a need for a 300 dpi monitor when you're not holding it in your hand, a foot away from your face.

Re:Less necessary

[EdZ]

'Retina' isn't even correct. Your eye is not a camera, and does not function in the same way. The "~100ppi" figure may work for discriminating between separate pixels, but is insufficient for vernier acuity.

Get over it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know how much those suckers cost per square inch? A screen for a portable will cost a bunch more and this weekend you will see how much more when Apple releases a 15" laptop with "retina" display. They have supreme supply chain and capital investment advantages so the commodity PC market should cost about 20-30% more since they buy displays on the spot market. Too bad, so sad.

JJ

Re:Get over it!

[otuz]

Laptop displays aren't more expensive than desktop displays. They are the same kind of panels, just in a different package.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:A tad longer than that

[pegasustonans]

"Ever since the release of the iPhone 4 with its 326 pixels-per-inch (PPI) Retina display, people have wondered about the lack of high-PPI desktop displays"

I'm pretty sure gamers have been wondering about this a heck of a lot longer than that!

I don't know if gamers in recent years care as much about this.

If you're sitting on a couch 6+ feet from a TV or you're sitting a couple feet from a 27" monitor, I think putting more pixels per inch has diminishing returns relatively quickly.

Personally, I'd be very interested in higher resolutions for larger displays, but the PPI issue is not as important to me.

Still using 1920x1440 CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea how old it is but I'm using a 1920x1440, 23" CRT. It's basically irreplaceable. I got it off a relative about 5 years ago.

Yes it weighs 90lbs but I care more about actual function than formfactor. Why am I the only one?

Re:Still using 1920x1440 CRT

[fredgiblet]

I wouldn't mind having a CRT if I had a larger desk. There are definitely nice things about them. However pure digital video is nice too.

Re:Still using 1920x1440 CRT

[cheetah]

You may not actually be seeing all of those pixels on your old Crt. Before I switched to LCD's in the early 2000's I had a 21inch Hitachi CRT. One of the big features of the CRT was that it actually had enough pixel elements(low enough pixel pitch) to actually truly display 1600x1200.

It was possible to drive it to 2048x1536 resolutions but the grill just didn't have the elements to show all of those pixels. Most of the other competing 21inch monitors at the time did not have a low enough pixel pitch.

Now the interesting thing... your irreplaceable 23 inch monitor if it has a pixel pitch of at least .25mm is likely displaying at 100Dpi. Matching the dpi that this page was complaining about. Given that a 23 inch monitor was really high end, you likely have enough pixel elements to see 100 Dpi. But it's something to keep in mind

Re:Still using 1920x1440 CRT

[ChunderDownunder]

I bought a 2nd hand 20" Trinitron about 8 years ago for about $200 that did something like 1750x1300 (don' t quote me on that) with a little xorg.conf tweaking. A bitch to move - I got bruises from the weight!

I sent it to the recycling centre earlier this year when it became unbearable - the pixels had become fuzzy and dull.

So I think there's a lot of people clinging to CRTs but these things only last for about 10-15 years!

Hazro anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the owner of a 27" IPS monitor from Hazro which has a resolution of 2560x1440. I paid £450 for it. The panel in it is the exact panel that is put in the Apple Cinema Displays (which cost £900). Best monitor I've ever used - my productivity increased dramatically when I got it. It doesn't even need much in the way of horsepower to run it either. I was using an Nvidia GTX 470 however that died when my PSU blew and I'm temporarily using a very old 8800GT which handles it perfectly, even with numerous applications on numerous desktops with compiz on.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Korin43]

High resolution without AA > low res with AA.

Half

[SuperKendall]

B) expect the Retina Macbooks to be in the $2000-2500 range.

Since I correctly halved the consensus guess of the original iPad at $500, I'll also guess we'll see a retina Macbook Air for $999.

Apple doesn't like changing prices, up or down. The only precident for such is the Mac mini, which did have a price jump for the lowest model.

Moore's law(should) also apply for displays...

[RandomStr]

There is no reason why Moore's law shouldn't also apply for displays, but there are/where a few stumbling blocks along the way:

-Manufacture collusion - for far too long a good portion of the manufactures where artificially controlling the price, and in turn holding back innovation and competition...
-Cable standards - Getting a sufficient amount of data to the screen is still a problem, current DisplayPort cable are barely capable of 4K...
-OS support - Better that is was a few years ago, but there still seems to be a prevailing view that high-PPI means small text rather than crisp text...
-Changing Markets - Computer where once the realm of tech. heads(who knew what was good and not), but times have changed, computer are largely consumer devices, bought by people who don't realise that FullHD is all probability a lower rez./PPI monitor than the CRT they had ten years ago...
-A change of tides in the management of the IT - Most IT company both hardware and software, are now run by non-technical management types seeking shot term goals to satisfying their myopic bonus objectives, rather than the tradition model of perusing long-term technical-research-development objectives...

As to the article, nice that they mentioned the IBM T220, I don't subscribe to their conclusions(obviously); chances are its just apple astroturfing...

It's not so easy and It's not needed so much

[pisarevsky]

I suppose it's not so easy to create cheap retina display. Let's remember that only iPhone and iPad have it even in the niche of smartphones. And another reason is that we use smartphone or tablet much closer to our eyes than usual monitor, so higher dpi is more noticeable

Re:It's not so easy and It's not needed so much

[jones_supa]

It might be slightly more costy, but I would assume that manufacturing processes have advanced sufficiently already to make much smaller pixels for a reasonable price. The current DPI of screens is still lagging in the stone age, after all.

Re:It's not so easy and It's not needed so much

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose it's not so easy to create cheap retina display. Let's remember that only iPhone and iPad have it even in the niche of smartphones.

HORSESHIT DETECTED! HORSESHIT DETECTED! VERY HIGH PROBABILITY OF HORSE'S ARSE NEARBY!

While you were sucking Steve Jobs's corpse's dick, HTC, LG, and Sony all released new phones with 720p screens and higher PPI than the iPhone.

Of course, LG has had a 333-ppi phone since 2008, but I wouldn't expect you to know about it, since it was sold in Asia, and only US/EU actually matter.

HD

[Conspire]

HD killed the mass market for higher and high definition displays. All the notebooks, even desktop displays no longer had to fight over resolutions, they all just went "HD". and hence the mass market settled on 'HD". The display makers were pleased, they could finally stop building new production lines every time DPI went up every 6 months before they got their capex back. The laptop makers were pleased, they could stop worrying about competing on display resolution in the mass market and spam out "HD" or even "HD Ready" on everything (HD Ready was SD with HDMI input...what a scam in itself". There are some interesting articles about how this phenomena killed the race for higher DPI displays in the mass market. Its been going on for years, the longest stagnation in the display mass market since the introduction of the PC to the masses............

Re:HD

[hackertourist]

HD Ready was SD with HDMI input...what a scam in itself

In Europe, HD Ready was standardized to mean 720p capability. From your words I gather that 480i/SD displays were sold as "HD Ready" in the US?

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

HD ready was anything that could recieve an HD stream. Whether it had enough resolution or frequency to actually display the entire stream wasn't considered.

You Don't Need eBay: 2560 x 1440 IPS, $400, Retail

[meehawl]

Yeah, this article's assumptions about pricing already seem like some quaint notions around three years out of date. These higher-res monitors are now appearing in retail:

EQ276W 27" LED Monitor

distance to image

[Chirs]

You forgot to factor in distance to the screen. 100dpi on a monitor 24" away is like 300dpi on a phone 8" away.

Re:distance to image

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not, it's the same dpi but further away. You do generally require less resolution the further away you get, but that doesn't mean that the resolution has been magically increased by screen pixies, it means you're further away from the screen.

I have no idea where you got that idea from.

Re:distance to image

[gatzke]

He is correct.

You forgot to factor in distance to the screen. 100dpi on a monitor 24" away is like 300dpi on a phone 8" away.

It is all about how much the eye can resolve. Closer, you need a higher dpi/resolution or you see more pixelation. Further away, you can get away with less dpi without pixelation.

comparing retail with ebay

[Chirs]

You're comparing a commonly available retail product with something off ebay where you need to ship it back to Korea if anything goes wrong?

Re:comparing retail with ebay

[niftydude]

OK, ebay was just an example, as I assume an international audience on /. I'm not sure where you live, but you can also get these monitors at retail stores in the US at microcenter for just under $400 - still less than half of what TFA quoted.

And yes - microcenter has 20 odd locations US-wide, so you can pop in and out to your heart's content.

Re:comparing retail with ebay

[espiesp]

2560x1440 27" displays are nothing exotic or hard to find from any number of us based sources. It's just a lot cheaper to order from Korea.

Re:comparing retail with ebay

[kyrio]

Buy it from Micro Center.

3D displays and OLED is he cause, not "HD"

[Anonymous Coward]

High-definition had its phase but after that they had to decide which direction they were going to go next. 3D made a big hit a few years ago and so that's where it went. But even back in 2003, there were experiments on getting LED and OLED displays because it had so many practical means to it. It could be theoretically bent, shaped shifted, and tablets could have been created out of them. A few years later they managed to get color and so on, and there were 4k resolution monitors that were available. Not too long after that 5k resolution monitors came out, but again -- these monitors cost as much as a plasma screen did 15 years ago. However, 4K isn't what these companies are trying to release as what I've noticed. They are trying to make bigger 3D "glasses-less" displays. But the resolution gets cut with 3D so it might be a viable option to see the next generation 3D glasses-less displays with 5k resolutions.

Re:A tad longer than that

[cayenne8]

Recently...I was looking for a new set up, both for a job I was contracting to do (windows based)...needing large screen for multiple windows at once...and also, I had just bought a new Canon 5D3, and looking to edit high resolution stills and HD video....this was on a macbook pro I gave myself last year. Contract was paying for the monitor, nice side job.

Anyway, wanting something nice, I had a major surprise trying to find something larger that 1080p.....I shopped around and finally found the best deal I could on a Dell u2711....2560x1440.

I paid about $800 on it, most priced it then about $1K.

I was shocked, not so much at the price, which was steeper than I'd thought...but at the sheer lack of higher resolution monitors out there even available.

I mean...nice that TVs are all nice 1080p, but the influence has seemingly killed the computer monitor market.

I guess like how the general public has forgotten what good sound reproduction can be, and the value of it.....we've lost how nice a higher end resolution monitor can be for working. Sure...multiple monitors are nice, but why not START with a nice big high resolution one...and later..save and pair THAT with a 2nd nice one?

Sure is nice having a LOT on one screen....having multiple 'screens' with lots of real estate on them is even nicer.....double that eventually..and..well...

iPad3 is stll just $499, even with 4x the pixels

[Brannon]

of the IPad 1 & 2, and there's no other comparable competitor for that product either. Kinda makes your prediction sound silly.

Re:A tad longer than that

[cayenne8]

Sitting 6' or so from a 59" plasma tv is pretty nice.

Hell, I'd like bigger if I had a bigger place to put one...why limit yourself?

For computer work, especially if you're getting into DSLR full frame cameras that are coming out...for stills and the high end HD video...a high resolution monitor is really nice for post processing.

want more information

[Chirs]

I don't need the "retina" aspect of it, I want the _pixels_. Even with virtual desktops I'm always running out of room...I'd be more efficient with a bigger screen.

Sure, you can go multimonitor (and I do) but the gap between the screens just annoys me.

Re:want more information

[strack]

this. id much prefer 1 x 42 inch 3840x2160 display than 4 x 21 inch 1920x1080 displays

Re:want more information

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't need the "retina" aspect of it, I want the _pixels_. Even with virtual desktops I'm always running out of room...I'd be more efficient with a bigger screen.

...
You realise that it would be completely illegible, right?

Old Windows, pre-Vista, used to lock the DPI at 96 regardless of the monitor's real DPI which is why text and icons got smaller when you increased the pixel count (e.g. 1024x768->1280x1024). In a properly designed system, text should be measured physically (Did you know that "point", as in 10pt, means x/72 of an inch and has nothing to do with pixels? 10pt is 10/72 of an inch so the physical size of the screen is rather important for how much will fit on it.).

The entire point of increasing the pixel count on a screen whilst keeping the physical dimensions the same is to drive up the DPI so that you can no longer see individual pixels (lines are lines rather than a zig-zag, curves are curves rather than a bunch of line segments drawn in a vague approximation of an arc).

Sure, yes, you could zoom the screen (force the DPI down manually so more stuff will fit) but when you're trying to read text that tiny, eye-strain is guaranteed.

Re:want more information

[arkane1234]

I don't need the "retina" aspect of it, I want the _pixels_.

I do not think retina means what you think it means...

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

While technically true in reference to the Golden Girls, confidant is the more commonly used word.

Wait until Monday

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the persistent rumors about new hardware releases from Apple at WWDC is "retina" displays on macbook pros and a new Apple Cinema Display with high DPI. As of Mountain Lion resolution independence should be completely supported in OS X.

2048x1536 @120hz here. RIP CRT's :(

[sanermind]

You're not the only one, brother. I'm still running on an old 23" CRT that does 2048x1536 @ 120hz ...it also has kelvin color temperature controls (and sRGB and a few other) color profiles built in. The color detail for editing photographs is vastly better than you can get on LCD's.

Also, since it does 120hz, I also can use it for stereo3D (yes, this is a 12-14 yr. old monitor!) at 2048x1536... (which is BLOODY AWESOME for nvidia 3D-vision gaming, especially since I can turn the brightness -way- up to 100 and solve all the issues with shutter-glasses dimness you see with LCDs)

..unfortunately, I suspect it might finally be starting to die. When I first turn it on, the color brightness and darkens intermittently for a minute or two until it's fully warmed up (it didn't ever use to do that before)

The worst thing, is that when CRT's were on there way out 4-5 years ago, I looked up the price of a new one (I was thinking of getting another one for my girlfriends computer, but she insisted on a 'flat panel') ...and they were still for sale, and marked down ridiculously... I could have gotten a spare for under $300 (-including shipping-!!!) ...I figured "well, thats nice! CRT's are so cheap now, cause everone want's LCDs, silly people! Good to know!" Of course, now, that I likely need to get a new one soonish, they're no longer available anywhere at any price.

*cries*

Re:2048x1536 @120hz here. RIP CRT's :(

[Ginger Unicorn]

It's very likely that you CRT can be serviced/repaired. It's probably just an aged capacitor.

Re:2048x1536 @120hz here. RIP CRT's :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Make a repairer change its capacitors, shouldn't be more expensive than that

Re:2048x1536 @120hz here. RIP CRT's :(

[KozmoStevnNaut]

It's kinda tangential, but I have a 1920x1200 TFT, which I have been extremely happy with for the last 5 years (P-MVA panel, so full 32bit color). Last year, it started to get ornery on me. It wouldn't display right until it warmed up, very much like if the vertical hold on a CRT failed. Finally it completely gave up and wouldn't even turn on anymore.

I opened it up and located a couple of very obviously blown capacitors in the power supply. I replaced them with about $5 worth of good-quality parts and it's been perfect every since.

I really like this monitor, I've taken the time and calibrated it properly, it's great for images, text, movies and games and I'm so relieved that it only took a couple of hours and a few bucks to bring it back to life.

Don't forget laptops!

[WoTG]

I'm writing this on my 3 year old laptop w/15 inch 1440x900 screen. When I bought it, I believe the standard screen resolution was 1280x800. For the extra $100 or so, I've been very happy with the extra pixels. Unfortunately, this laptop is falling apart and I've been trying to figure out what to do screen wise on it's replacement.

Thanks to widescreen TV, almost all entry level laptops only come in 1366x768 screens, "HD". I've used other people's laptops, and I'm pretty sure I would miss the vertical pixels. (Why isn't more software optimized for widescreen use yet?)

Without going to a 17 inch laptop, it looks like I'm going to have to pay a huge premium (i.e. at least 50% more) to upgrade to a mid-range laptop from whatever entry level laptop is on sale at a bricks and mortar, or at Dell. Even then, there's not a lot of selection.

Re:Don't forget laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

ASUS Zenbook Prime may interest you.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

Interesting. The Shimian and Catleap have been around for a few months now, at least, at under $350 shipped. Not only are they both 2560x1440 IPS displays, but the Catleap was able to do 120Hz, and a new set of 120Hz capable Catleaps are being produced.

Sucks to be you.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure is nice having a LOT on one screen

I support people who scream if their resolution is anything higher than about 800x600. Everything is "Too Small!" and even if I enable the high resolution settings in windows it's still "Not Right!"

people still use native software?

[cheekyboy]

more and more stuff moves to the web/browser model, it can scale nicely, no need to rely on the OS, and how ironic is that, HA!

The browser is better than the OS.

So together with WebGL, and html5, you can achieve the same or better GUI as native apps, and be as fast, and faster than any ugly java gui too, so screw you oracle.

So there, ditch native apps/guis. Code for html5+webgl.

But surely to run old native apps at 2x, like the ipad can run iphone apps, should be easy to do, just scale that window 2x.

Oh and btw, re iPad running iPhone HD apps in SD, comon Apple, how dare you run iPhone Apps that run in full HD res, in 50% sized SD crap res like an 3GS. Run it at 1:1 pixel, if theres a slight border, who gives a rats ass, its better than a tiny iphone app.

Get a clue apple devs, fix it, ya lazy SOBs.

Sure?

[SvenLee]

The fact is, high-resolution desktop displays do exist, but they're incredibly expensive and usually only used for medical applications.

What would you do with it?

[rsilvergun]

First off, desktop displays are 27" max, and most 24". It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference (insert 100+ /.ers with 40/40 vision claiming otherwise). Second off, since 90% of games are xbox360 ports what diff does it make (x2)?

That said, ultra high res displays do have one good use for gaming. Phony vector games (think ports of Asteroids) look awesome :).

Re:What would you do with it?

[geedubyoo]

40/40 vision is the same as 20/20 vision. 20/20 vision is considered to be "normal"; 20/40 is half as good as 20/20, while 20/10 is twice as good. The numerator refers to the distance of the observer from the chart in feet. The denominator is more complicated, but essentially refers to the distance between lines on the chart (according to Wikipedia this is measured in mm, which I find odd given that the numerator is measured in feet).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity (Wikipedia.com)

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few months ago I got a used IBM T221. 3840 x 2400. It makes ALL the difference in the world! I can actually easily fit 3 browsers up side by side even when viewing all those fixed-width fullscreen-expecting websites out there, and they all look sharp and crisp. I can have a tall browser, tall IDE, and two extra large xterms all within instant field of view, all rendered clearly. A pleasure to look at.

My coding productivity has gone up simply by not having to constantly click around to uncover one buried window or another. I can fit dense text, code, and references on the screen without making it unreadable due to too few pixels per character.

And then there's picture editing. You haven't truly seen godly image quality, until you've seen a well-composed picture taken with a good-quality camera rendered in all its glory at better than 4x the resolution of HDTV. And, of course, video editing: a full-resolution HDTV clip takes up one corner of the screen. Plenty of room for menus browsers and even a second or third video source.

Simply put, you have no idea what you're missing. It really is *that* good.

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, desktop displays are 27" max, and most 24". It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference (insert 100+ /.ers with 40/40 vision claiming otherwise). Second off, since 90% of games are xbox360 ports what diff does it make (x2)?

That said, ultra high res displays do have one good use for gaming. Phony vector games (think ports of Asteroids) look awesome :).

Read text?

Printed text on paper has a DPI of 400. A monitor has a DPI of 90 or even less. There's a reason monitors cause eyestrain more easily then reading a book, and it isn't just because of the backlight.

Re:What would you do with it?

[YttriumOxide]

Read text?

Printed text on paper has a DPI of 400. A monitor has a DPI of 90 or even less.

While I agree with the point you're making, I just wanted to point out that most modern printers are 600dpi (and occasionally more, although many claiming to be "1200dpi" are actually 600x1200)

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

They were never costumer displays, but it was an amazing result, even more taking into account the date. But for all the hopes it was too much for the graphics cards of the date. Moving 4 times as much pixels as it was normal (1920*1200) just a couple years ago was too much. That is the same reason gamers are careful with resolution.
An example of our time is the medical displays from today, like Barco's

http://www.barco.com/en/Specsheets/62f5f5e7-a014-429d-b20d-da7847335ef9/coronis-fusion-6mp-dl-mdcc-6130.pdf

Re:What would you do with it?

[bsane]

It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference

That is 100% based on distance to screen- from your couch 1080p is probably overkill on a 37", sitting at a desk 1080p is marginally ok on a 23" monitor.

Re:What would you do with it?

[coats]

Did you ever compare the output between 300DPI vs 600DPI vs 1200DPI laser printers (or 4800DPI Linotype)? It's definitely there -- and printer resolution is *way* beyond the resolutions we are discussing for monitors.

FWIW.

Re:What would you do with it?

[modmans2ndcoming]

are you nuts? 1080p at greater than 24 inches is painful as hell to look at. If you see black lines and jagged edges, then you need more resolution.

Re:What would you do with it?

[Flammon]

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know this monitor existed. The contrast ratio doesn't seem that great though from the specs, would you care to comment on that. ... damn AC, I guess I'll never know unless he/she is still reading the thread.

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's the best example of Wikifail that I've come across today.

This proportion is dead simple. The numerator is how far you are from the visual target; the denominator is how far an observer with "standard acuity" would have to be to see as much detail as you see.

20/20: You see at 20 feet (meters, furlongs, whatever) what a normal person could see at 20 feet (meters, furlongs, respectively).

20/100: Whatever detail you see at 20 feet, a normal person could see at 100 feet. Your vision sucks.

20/10: Whatever detail you see at 20 feet, a normal person would have to get within 10 feet to see. Your vision rocks.

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

shame itd probably be shit for gaming :(

what with the response rate, black levels, color accuracy, etc

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, a person with 20/20 vision can identify details as well as the average human can from 20 feet away. A person with 20/10 vision can identify the same level of detail from 20 feet away as the average person can identify from 10 feet away.

As an aside, did you know that your vision can be corrected to be better than a normal person's?

Re:What would you do with it?

[sylvandb]

Printer resolution has nothing to do with pixel (dot) size.

Printer resolution is addressable dots, which when used the printer then proceeds to splat a big blot at each addressed location.

Re:What would you do with it?

[julesh]

It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference

At regular TV viewing distances (about 2-3m), perhaps this is true. Most people sit a lot closer to their monitors than that.

A person with average eyesight can detect differences on a scale of 1 arc-minute. A 37" (94cm) 1080px vertical (2203px diagonal) display has 0.43mm pixels. The distance at which this level of detail is resolvable for most people is about 94cm/tan(1/60 degrees) = about 1m50.

I sit around 40cm from my monitor. This means (assuming I have average eyesight) I can detect the improvement from increasing beyond this resolution with any display larger than 37"*(40/150) = about 10".

Re:What would you do with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have the technology...

Re:What would you do with it?

[ChrisMaple]

Assuming there isn't something wrong with the eye other than inability to focus at distance, the X/Y method of describing focusing ability is defective. Better is to state the number of diopters required to achieve infinity focus. By this metric, 20/20 could be as bad as -0.197. Eye doctors don't write prescriptions in X/Y, they use diopters.

Re:What would you do with it?

[toddestan]

The actual contrast on the screen is just fine. It just dates back before the contrast ratio became a marketing game so it doesn't have some hugely inflated meaningless number.

Re:What would you do with it?

[CAIMLAS]

A few months ago I got a used IBM T221. 3840 x 2400.

My coding productivity has gone up simply by not having to constantly click around to uncover one buried window or another

I do wonder how people 20 years ago got along on their 80x24 character terminals. Sure, we've got better software to deal with things like coding these days, but as evidenced by all the constant clicking you do to put these new fangled windows into usable positions indicates, people seem to overlook the fact that modern GUIs make you painfully dependent on the mouse for doing things which should be happening at least semi-automatically for you.

Re:What would you do with it?

[otuz]

I got one of those a few years ago and I agree with you fully; nothing replaces one productivity-wise, except maybe another. Allows editing end viewing up to around 1500 lines of code without scrolling per monitor at once, when using eight 80-char columns (or five columns in portrait mode). The 200ppi of it is easily viewable even with the smallest font sizes (9pt monaco is my favourite terminal/code font) from 1m or so, while wearing glasses (or having naturally good vision). I'd actually welcome a 400ppi display of equivalent (or larger) physical size, would allow getting rid of most of the anti-aliasing. 200ppi isn't enough to obscure the jagginess of aliased lines. I also love the smaller widgets not taking up a major share of the workspace, like they do on low-definition displays.
One issue they had a decade ago, while these monitors were still produced, was inadequate display connector bandwidth, that's why early models required four DVI heads to drive the monitor at full refresh rates (or lower refresh rates with fewer heads). Later models added dual-link DVI support (two dual-link heads with the same effect as four single-links). Nowadays, however, we have things like DisplayPort 1.2, which can easily deliver the bandwidth required, so connectivity is no longer an excuse. As for games, you can drop anti-aliasing and details for higher framerates (without making the graphics look awful) in cases where your GPU isn't powerful enough or the game is too demanding for your GPU. Most of the current games run fine at full res and details using a few years old GPU (ATI 4870 in my case).
People complaining about blurriness should have their vision checked and get some glasses or contact lenses. Those people are a traffic hazard anyway if they can't see properly, whether they admit it or not. 200ppi and higher from normal viewing distances and normal vision is perfectly usable.
3840x2400 to 1920x1200 is like 1600x1200 is to 800x600. Once you up the resolution, you are not going back.

Re:What would you do with it?

[otuz]

Printer resolution has nothing to do with pixel (dot) size.

It has everything to do with pixel (dot) size. The only difference is for halftone vs blended shades per dot/pixel. Some printers (dye-sublimation and such) mix the color dots instead of rasterizing.
PPI and DPI are equivalent, when viewing high-contrast shapes, like text.

Re:What would you do with it?

[jedwidz]

That's true looking at just the resolution, but overall it's not a fair comparison, since a printer 'dot' is either there or not (1 bit per colour), whereas a display 'dot' is a full-colour pixel.

How about we compare the information density?

A typical monitor with 100 ppi and (waves hands) 24 bits per pixel is 2400 bits per inch.

A CMYK print at 600DPI is also 2400 bits per inch.

Re:What would you do with it?

[jaymemaurice]

I don't know if the AC is a troll, but T221 has a horrible lag... they are awesome... but shit at the same time.

Because of buggy software

[KingTank]

Lots of apps don't work too good when you scale up the font size. Text overflows various graphical borders, windows, the edges of the screen, so you're forced to use a font which is too tiny to read at ultra-high resolutions.

yeah its so hard to make a spec

[cheekyboy]

Gee, just plug in the X Y sizes in the codec. Is it so hard to make the spec?

4x data, just compress it a little more aggressively, because those 8x8 pixel blocks will be sooooo zoooomed in, you can compress them quite highly.

Or will they encode data as 4 normal HD streams then recombine in memory so that the same data stream can be played on normal cheap blurays too.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[The Master Control P]

4x data, just compress it a little more aggressively, because those 8x8 pixel blocks will be sooooo zoooomed in, you can compress them quite highly.

Aurgh Jesus fuck NO!!!!! No no no a thousand times NO!

If you compress the video file into the same size, 3840x2160 offers absolutely nothing whatsoever vs 1920x1080 because the information is not there and there's no way around that.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[ongelovigehond]

But the marketing value will quadruple, and that's all that matters.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[tepples]

Or will they encode data as 4 normal HD streams

Good luck buying enough channels from the FCC or foreign counterparts to be able to do that over the air.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[ColdWetDog]

If you're talking about television, the information stopprd at 640x480.

The rest is noise.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to come up with better DRM of course.

Re:yeah its so hard to make a spec

[Kjella]

Aurgh Jesus fuck NO!!!!! No no no a thousand times NO! If you compress the video file into the same size, 3840x2160 offers absolutely nothing whatsoever vs 1920x1080 because the information is not there and there's no way around that.

Uh, you start with an uncompressed 4K source so saying the information is "not there" is meaningless. Just because you end up with the same size, doesn't mean the same information is preserved. Every codec has a sweet spot, if you have too little bandwidth the codec is starved and you should decrease resolution, if you have too much bandwidth you don't have enough pixels to encode the detail in so you should increase resolution. For H.264 the rule of thumb for encodes is around 0.2 bits/pixel depending on grain and noise, so 1920*1080*24 fps*0.2 ~= 10 Mbit. That is to say, BluRays are generally oversaturated with bandwidth.

Of course more is always better, so a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream will look better than a 10 Mpbs 1920x1080, regardless of the sweet spot. But a 40 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would have a lot more detail than a 40 Mbps 1920x1080 stream because it's in the sweet spot, of course a 160 Mbps 3840x2160 stream would be the very best but you can have very, very good 4K for the same bandwidth as a BluRay. You will need 4x as powerful decoding chips though, since you're still decoding 4x the pixels. But knowing the movie industry they'll probably put 4K movies on new discs with new DRM and new connectors with even more new DRM for round 3 of the CSS/AACS/BD+/HDCP wars.

Yo! Retina display, Mac user: Why they go together

[Anonymous Coward]

Every idiot seems abuzz about the possibility of a new MacBook Pro, likely to be announced next week at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Many fart that the world as we know it may end it if the new MacBooks don't have a Retina display. Cripers.

Fucking Time magazine ran the headline, "What If Apple's New MacBook Pros Don't Have Retina Displays?"Ã"implying that it would be a disaster and could be a gigantic letdown. Puh-leeze.

The only lame-brain reason for the super-high resolution screen is so you can get some detail on a 3.5-inch cell phone screen or on a smaller display in a cameras viewfinder. Ever since the introduction of the so-called Retina display, all we hear about is Retina this and Retina that.

I put my AMOLED Android screen next to Apple's Retina display all the time and my display looks better. Nobody denies it. So what's the fuss and why does everyone now want this Retina display on a larger format?

I sure as hell don't. For one thing, it would be a disaster for performance. Those extra pixels have to be addressed, you know, and since you do not want text that appears to be one pica high, a lot of effort would go into the scaling of everything. In a side-by-side comparison at a three-foot distance, it is doubtful that the Retina display on a 15-inch screen would look much different than 1920x1080.

The late-great Panasonic once shouted from the rooftop that at any normal viewing distance from a flat panel TV, nobody could tell the difference between 720p and 1080p unless the display was bigger than 50-inches. I'm certain, though, that all the iPhone mavens would want a Retina display TV because I hear a loud buzz demanding 4K TVs. These are sets that would typically be anywhere from 4096x1714 to 3996x2160 to 4096x3112. Really? You want that? "Yeah, man!"

Yeah, I suppose if you are right on top of the set, you'd notice. Of course, no broadcaster is going to invest in such gear for decades; they all hated upgrading to HD. And who's got the bandwidth for mass distribution of this sort of signal? I suppose this is all beside the point.

Maybe a Nikon or Canon D-SLR will eventually be geared to shoot a 24-megapixel (say 8000x3000) movie at 60 frames per second and we can all "ooooh" and "ahhh" at the beautiful movie when someone shows it on a Retina display laptop at the office.

But you know, if you want genuine super-high resolution, you can go outside and look at a nature, right? I wonder if anyone realizes that anymore. Does anyone go outdoors and see a tree and remark, "Wow, look at the resolution of that bark! How many pixels do you think this is?"

I think the invention of the Retina display has made the discussion ridiculous, just like Mac users are.

Re:A tad longer than that

[JohnboyHolmes]

Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.

Re:Good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, if you want to edit 1920x1080p video, and have video clips and editing tools on screen at once. Not everyone is merely a consumer of content you know.

Umm what about pixel dept dynamic range

[cheekyboy]

Resolution is only one dimension.

Where are the full 12 bits per R,G,B dynamic range screens? or full 16x16x16 color range?

Even your normal 8x8x8 bit LCDs are fake, and usual 6bit, that flicker fast between patterns to achieve the fake 8bit range.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/a/LCDColor.htm

Re:Umm what about pixel dept dynamic range

[theshowmecanuck]

This is exactly it. If they gave us the best that they have already, then they wouldn't be able to "improve" all these other parameters to keep inflating the price point.

Re:Umm what about pixel dept dynamic range

[styrotech]

I haven't seen any evidence of them caring the slightest bit about improving the parameters to inflate prices.

If anything it's the other way around. They are happy for parameters to go backwards so they can ship shittier specifications (which Joe Public doesn't care about anyway) at lowish prices but in larger volumes.

Re:Umm what about pixel dept dynamic range

[otuz]

They can still inflate screen sizes even if they go with higher resolutions. The limit will still be basically what people are willing to pay. It'll take a while before wall-sized 1200ppi displays are a commodity.

Not just iPhone

[utkonos]

I've been wondering for a while (basically every time I look at my HTC android phone) why my top of the line Asus monitor is not as good as my phone, and it cost way, way more.

Pixel doubling support is key

[proxima]

The bottom line is that at the distances people view their desktop monitors, they don't want the buttons, graphics, and text to be any smaller than they appear with about 80-100 ppi screens. Give all but the most recent applications and operating systems a 130 PPI screen, and there will be UI items that don't scale. Some UI items, like text, will, leaving the interface feeling out of proportion. Higher PPI screens are available on laptops because 1.) Some people demand the implied screen real estate and 2.) Laptop screens are generally closer to your face. I won't discount the whole 1080p standard putting a natural cap on many screens these days (though my 24" BenQ is one of a dwindling set of 1920x1200 panels).

This is why when Apple put high PPI screens in the iphone and ipad, it doubled the PPI. Existing apps would look the same*. Apps can trivially use perhaps the single greatest feature of high PPI: more crisp text with less dependence on antialiasing to mimic round corners.

And it's why, I suspect, if Apple does release Macbooks this year with "retina" displays, they will be double the PPI. While Mac OS X in theory supports a reasonably scalable UI, applications may not. And web browsers will want to operate as if they're rendering in the lower PPI, though rendering text and non-bitmapped elements at the higher resolution. Eventually (maybe next year), we'll see expensive Apple Cinema displays doing the same thing. And there will be the normal competitors (especially Dell).

But until recently, a 150 or 200 DPI LCD was crazy expensive to produce. Judging from the ipad 3, it also takes significantly more backlight capacity (provided by very bright LEDs in that case). We're just now entering a stage in which there are rumors about the 11" and 13" Macbook line getting them, maybe the 15". It will be a while before the 27" and 30" panels can be produced at a price people are willing to pay. That said, I'm holding off buying any more monitors or replacing my T series Thinkpad until they're available. I'm hoping I don't have to wait past 2013.

* Or at least ought to. Some apps on a third gen ipad will actually look fuzzier than it should.

Re:Pixel doubling support is key

[shutdown -p now]

Some apps on a third gen ipad will actually look fuzzier than it should.

I think this is because most apps use stock widgets and at least some stock icons, and those are drawn at native resolution. More importantly, all text is also drawn in native resolution. So a bunch of low-res upscaled images scattered around really stands out.

Re:Pixel doubling support is key

[proxima]

I think this is because most apps use stock widgets and at least some stock icons, and those are drawn at native resolution. More importantly, all text is also drawn in native resolution. So a bunch of low-res upscaled images scattered around really stands out.

My point is that some apps seem to look worse on an ipad 3 than on an ipad 2, as if the pixel doubling wasn't quite right for some reason. Honestly I haven't put the same app side by side on two devices to see, so it's possible that as you suggest it's all in my head.

Re:Pixel doubling support is key

[shutdown -p now]

My point is that some apps seem to look worse on an ipad 3 than on an ipad 2, as if the pixel doubling wasn't quite right for some reason.

That was what I was referring to, as well. For iPad apps, iOS doesn't just render them at iPad 2 screen size then upscale as a single bitmap. Rather, it scales up individual bitmap operations, and it scales them in the best way it can. So, for a non-retina-aware iPad app, its text will be rendered at retina level, because iOS can do it for it - but it'll have to upscale the bitmaps by doubling the pixels. So you end up with those situations when half of the app looks retina, and half doesn't - and, depending on the proportion of elements, it may end up actually looking worse than if everything was just low-res.

For games (which seems to be entirely scaled by doubling), I haven't noticed any visual difference between iPad 2 and 3, as expected.

Re:Pixel doubling support is key

[KonoWatakushi]

It is a convenient hack which allows Apple to move forward without solving the real problems. We see that they are very fond of this approach with filesystems as well, and it is disgraceful that a company with their resources doesn't focus more effort on proper solutions. Hiding problems behind a pretty veneer only works so well, and for so long.

A true resolution independent interface is needed as much today as ever. Not for high-DPI support, but for accessibility. Doubling pixel dimensions does no good to address that problem; user eyesight varies, and we need to be able to scale the interface appropriately. It is as simple as that really, and a solution to that problem is long overdue.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about the anti-aliasing, or rather, being able to eradicate jaggies without use of AA. As it stands now, we're wasting a hell of a lot of processing power on AA that just wouldn't be necessary if the pixels were small enough to smooth out lines on their own.

What would you do with it? *everything*!!

[Space cowboy]

Blinks. Looks at 3 30" monitors. Takes out a measuring tape and checks. Yup, all 30"

Watchooalkinabout Willis ?

I still use multiple virtual desktops. There's ne'er any shortage of things to take up screen real-estate, I mean Xcode can easily take all 3 screens, Eagle too (1 for schematic, 1 for layout, 1 for libraries etc), actually pretty much anything I do... A better question is "who needs a computer (raher than a ipad, say) and *couldn't* use multiple 30" monitors ?"

simon

Re:What would you do with it? *everything*!!

[pipingguy]

Even for 3D CAD (which I do) use, even two 19" screens is stretching things a bit. Pun unintended. When intensely focusing on detail you can easily get neck pain from side-to-side head motion. At home I use a 30" 2560x1600 panel and that's a bit better (it replaced 2-19"s and 2-22"s in a quad setup) but still takes a lot of movement.

Has anyone else noticed printing getting smaller these days or are my 50 year-old Mark One Eyeballs deteriorating along with the rest of me?

Re:What would you do with it? *everything*!!

[chrismcb]

You are getting neck pain from side to side head motion? Perhaps you need to do some oversizes and build the muscles in your neck? You are more likely to get neck pain from an up down motion, but from side to side?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Gaygirlie]

Not me. I'd rather have current resolution and anti-aliasing than a slightly higher resolution.

Hm. At 1080p resolution I do not find any need for anti-aliasing whatsoever, plus thanks to higher display resolution UI-elements, text and textures themselves are much sharper than on a low-res display with anti-aliasing.

source code dude, or editing text

[cheekyboy]

Dude , or MOFO as your real name.

I want more res, so I can show more lines of code on screen without using a 6point font.

Another option is to use 2x displays at right angles to give an insane 2160 x 1920.

Re:Good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone with worse than average vision, I can still see the pixels on my display.

Re:Good enough

[The Master Control P]

Which is why every time I migrate from my 2560x1600 home desktop to my 1920x1080 work desktop I get mildly claustrophobic, and I'm practically unable to do anything on my shitty netbook's 1024x600 because there's no space to put anything, because they're all just as good.

Some of us actually need space to have multiple applications open because we actually use them to create things. I find it very useful than I can have 2-4 files open for editing on my desktop, along with a web browser and a terminal to test things in without having to constantly flip from one to the other.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Luckyo]

You would need a whole lot more processing power to render those pixels in the first place. AA methods use significant "cheating" to speed up the process, while rendering a high resolution scene means that you actually have to render that high resolution. There's a reason why most modern graphics cards and game don't even bother offering full multi sampling anti aliasing, which is what rendering a high resolution from get go is.

Re:A tad longer than that

[lightknight]

Indeed. 1080p is kind of a downgrade for those of us who had higher resolution monitors from yesteryear.

And if Apple release...

[Anonymous Coward]

a high-PPI desktop display, you really will love - buy it.

Re:A tad longer than that

[shutdown -p now]

Probably, but I'd appreciate at least 200. Meanwhile, what we typically get is about 100.

First with no bezel wins.

[Kaenneth]

I'm just waiting for someone to invent a borderless display panel, so that many small ones can be tiled to whatever size is needed.

Re:A tad longer than that

[jimmydevice]

and dreading it.

Re:Good enough

[icebraining]

I use 20 virtual workspaces on my 12" 1280x800 screen for that; pressing a simple key combination, and assuming your WM doesn't do useless animations, is as fast as looking to the other side of a big monitor.

That said, I still find the two big displays I have at work useful for some tasks, but I also spend to much time dealing with window focus issues.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you ever knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.

WTF? I did throw a party and you didn't get me anything.

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

Bureaucracy and penny-pinching can often override logical technical decisions that would actually result in a good product that people are willing to buy.

I have a 17" laptop with a tiny, cramped, unusable keyboard on it that was clearly designed for a much smaller laptop. There's something like 6 cm of unused area on either side of the keyboard, but every key is mashed up against every other key to save millimeters of space that don't need saving.

If any employees of Dell, HP, or Asus are reading this, print this out, walk up to your boss, and show him: You've saved maybe 50 cents per laptop by re-using the same keyboard part across every model, but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.

To my knowledge, no such thing exists. Nobody is willing to take my money. Maybe I'm a unique and special flower, and too small a market to bother with, but I suspect that maybe, just maybe, there might be a few people out there who, you know... type things... with their laptop keyboards.

Once some dumbass starts the race to the bottom, and every company in a market is doing the same thing, it can be hard to break of the endless cycle of shaving features or quality to under-bid the other guy. It takes vision to come up with a "revolutionary" product -- which is often blindingly obvious -- to shift the market. An example is Apple: they demonstrated that mobile phones don't need to shave cents off by using teeny-tiny screens. Customers are perfectly willing to pay $1000 for a phone that isn't made to the lowest possible spec, and they're now giving that money to Apple instead of Nokia. Remember Nokia? They're the company that used to be the biggest phone manufacturer in the world.

PC Monitors are in the same boat. When Windows 7 was announced, I got all excited about "deep colour", improved high DPI support, etc... I looked into monitors and whatnot too see if I could get a significant upgrade. Turns out that there are something like 4 or 5 models total that support 30-bit colour, none that support 36-bit, and most only at 1920x1080 or below. You can have high-resolution and deep colour, but not in combination with 120Hz or 3D. Don't even bother looking, because Displayport cables can't transmit that much data, and the only HDMI displays that go that high are all TVs.

HDTV

[Sarusa]

There are billions more people who want cheap HDTVs than want hi-res monitors, and since TVs are just computer monitors with built in receivers these days... we're screwed by 1080p being all you need for even the largest TV. Bring on the 4K!

Re:A tad longer than that

[Kjella]

Probably not, but far more than today. 20" away with 20/20 vision you can resolve FullHD on a 13" monitor. That is to say 4K on a 26" monitor, less if you got better than 20/20 - that's just the cutoff for normal vision. Okay you can argue if we'd see the full benefits or not but at monitor distance most people should be able to see more than FullHD, if it ever makes sense moving to 8K is a bit more dubious.

While we are showing our wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd pay good money for a 17" laptop that has the keyboard in the middle of the screen, instead of way over to the left side. I don't want to choose between a sore neck by sitting right in front of the screen, but my body turned left, of sitting right in front of the keyboard and turning my head to the right, all the time.

I've even seen some laptops that have a layout of, from left to right: keyboard, keypad, multimedia controls. Move those last ones all the way to the left (or, rather, omit them completely, who cares) and you have a useable keyboard at no extra cost.

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[TellarHK]

When you say "keyboard in the middle of the screen" are you specifically not wanting a numeric keypad of any type? This part can be a bit tricky, as manufacturers are typically more interested in having a "complete" keyboard on larger machines since they're able to tack on an additional bullet point for those users that will only buy a machine that has dedicated numeric keys.

I will agree in reference to the media keys that come on so many machines - the lack of such keys was actually a bit of a plus when it came to choosing my Sager NP8130 (Clevo P151HMx). The Sager keyboards tend to be fairly tightly placed, and without the plethora of frills you'll find with more mainstream brands.

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[bsane]

I assume you don't want a macbook pro? Their 17" has a centered keyboard.

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

my sony vaio fw270j is centered, no number pad and is very comfortable to type for a long period of time on. media keys are above the Fkeys and the speakers are set up at the base of the monitor to use the screen to amplify the sound. one of the best designed laptops IMOOther than the current 8 min batt life (its an 08 or 09 model on original batt) again this is the best laptop I have used

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but their keyboard is terrible for other reasons.

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[DocHoncho]

Hurray for Chic-let keyboards! Those things are truly awful.

Re:While we are showing our wishlist

[arkane1234]

What, do you have football player fingers and hit the enter key and , ; l keys at the same time?

Re:A tad longer than that

[TellarHK]

It's my hope that one small side-effect of the tablet market taking off like gangbusters, is that the manufacturers of laptops will be able to focus on the reasons why people buy a laptop over a tablet or powerful mobile phone (or in conjunction with same). And that is, to type and computer on it.

Laptops have traditionally - at least for the last several years - been designed around media consumption and occasional creation at the high end, and basic web browsing on the lower end. But the market should be changing, and perhaps Apple's upcoming refreshes will force other manufacturers to adapt to the new world of multiple portable options and what the strengths and weaknesses are on each.

They'll come when Apple makes them

[dell623]

The rest of the industry seems completely devoid of imagination. They'll just stick the latest from nVidia, AMD, and Intel into the same old pathetic badly designed and built laptop and desktop designs and race to the bottom to see who can sell the latest i9 ten core the cheapest, or try to ape whatever Apple came up with. Even the 2560x1440 27" monitors really only became cheaper after the 27" iMac came out. Plus, Windows isn't really set up to work well with very high resolution displays, and Windows 8 doesn't seem to be built for anyone who doesn't think that tablets are so awesome we can throw away our multi screen workstations.

Once Apple puts 200+ ppi displays into their laptops and desktop models, the industry will race to copy them. Until then, we're stuck with lovely 1366x768 displays, or 1920x1080 'Full HD' if you really search hard and limit your other options. But hey, you get the latest quad core Ivy Bridge on it! Who cares that yiu can see big square pixels and blocky text.

Re:They'll come when Apple makes them

[khipu]

It has nothing to do with "imagination". Apple has a customer base that is willing to pay a steep premium for the latest specs. I'm not willing to pay more than $1000 for a laptop or desktop, and I'm not willing to pay more than $300 for a monitor. People like me just wait until the price comes down, mostly driven by the early adopters willing to pay that premium.

The IBM T221

[nojayuk]

It had a flickery refresh rate of 43Hz, low contrast, low brightness, crap colour spectrum and lousy off-axis viewing as the cost for the number of pixels displayed on the 22" screen. The high cost and weird hardware requirements (if you ever buy a second-hand T221 make sure the cables come with it or you are SOL) killed it in the consumer market, restricting its use to scientific and engineering areas and some odd niches like day trading setups.

Re:The IBM T221

[toddestan]

In many ways, it was ahead of its time*. If you were to do something like it today, it wouldn't have most of those problems.

*sadly, it's time is still yet to come.

Re:The IBM T221

[otuz]

You don't know what you are talking about. TFT displays don't flicker even at 1Hz. The contrast is great, so is the colours (8bpp), it has more brightness than I need, I commonly use the range between minimum and half brightness. Low refresh rates on TFT's just translates to a bit more perceived lag for content, but 43Hz isn't bad and I run mine off two DVI outputs resulting in 34Hz, which is good enough even for movies, which are 24Hz to 30Hz anyway.

Re:The IBM T221

[Anonymous Coward]

It had a flickery refresh rate of 43Hz, low contrast, low brightness, crap colour spectrum and lousy off-axis viewing as the cost for the number of pixels displayed on the 22" screen. The high cost and weird hardware requirements (if you ever buy a second-hand T221 make sure the cables come with it or you are SOL) killed it in the consumer market, restricting its use to scientific and engineering areas and some odd niches like day trading setups.

It was an LCD, so 43Hz wouldn't be "Flickery." Contrast is a lie on newer screens anyway, so it's 400:1 wasn't as bad as it sounds. Not sure why you think it has a crap colour spectrum and I'm not sure it had bad off-axis viewing as I'm not sure it was a TN type screen. It was never meant for the consumer market and was never sold there. I believe it was designed for viewing satellite imagery.

Re:A tad longer than that

[ShakaUVM]

I too look for laptops with large keyboards on them. I tend to buy massively heavy desktop replacement laptops with a 45 minute battery life, so maybe my experience is different from yours, but I can find laptops with reasonably decent keyboards.

I'm not quite as fast on them as I am on my desktop, but I'm approximately 5x faster typing on my laptop than I am on my tablet's touchscreen, and about 2x as fast as when I use my tablet's docking keyboard (which is also too small).

As far as displays go, why are you adverse to buying TVs? TVs are much cheaper than comparable computer monitors, and if you do your research. For example, a 32" monitor will run you between $700-$900, but you can get a very nice LED TV you can use as a monitor for half that.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Available in what country?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Not available in my part of the world :(

Not strictly necessary

[fa2k]

Haven't we had this discussion before? Anyway, a desktop (e.g. 24") screen with 100 DPI can display 8pt text which is readable, but a little pixelated. This is also at the limit at how small text one can comfortably read. So a screen with greater than 100 DPI might be a win for 8pt text, but you can't cram in much more information before it's too small to read. It will be nicer to use, but may not increase productivity that much.

Re:A tad longer than that

[TheRaven64]

I started wondering when I got my Nokia 770 in 2006 with its 225dpi screen. A few months later, I used a 23" IBM monitor with the same resolution... which cost $10K. And then the reason became quite obvious. Modern displays are solid state parts. Just like ICs, they have a defect rate per area, which translates to dead or stuck pixels. As the feature size increases, the chance of defects increases. The bigger the display, the more chance that a defect will result in some dead or stuck pixels. If you make a single 27" panel, one defect will make it unsellable. If you make the same area of TFT but make it into smaller panels, then a defect will just make one unsellable[1].

There's also the secondary issue that unless you scale the DPI by a factor of 2 users are likely to see aliasing effects in bitmap rendering, and so perceive the display as being worse, which is why we don't see many intermediate sizes.

[1] Or, at least, harder to sell. There are lots of applications, such as control panels for industrial equipment, where a dead pixel or two is unimportant, and companies making these are quite happy to pay a bit less for slightly lower quality small panels. Selling defective 27" displays is much harder.

Re:A tad longer than that

[glitch0]

This is awesome, I had no idea monitors like this existed for this price. I found Shimian for sale on ebay but I can't find Catleap on Google except for some kind of owners club. Could I please have a link to where I can buy these monitors, or are they just on ebay?

My guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Up yo mama's butt.
On the customers' yachts.

Re:A tad longer than that

[jpapon]

Damn, I didn't know about those... I've had my U2711 for a couple years now, and I love it.

Now I'm thinking about ordering one of those Korean ones to have a massive dual setup... At 310 dollars, it's a goddamn steal.

I don't understand how they can afford to not charge for international shipping too. It can't be cheap to Fedex a 27" monitor from Korea to Germany.

I just don't know how I would arrange the monitors... one on top of the other? They're kind of wide to be using side by side.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't want to be a dick, but my Macbook Pro 17" has the same key spacing as my Apple Keyboard.

Re:A tad longer than that

[jones_supa]

This might be because the fonts get fatter when using a lower resolution, improving readability. If you instead increase the font size, in many cases the font weight does not increase much at all.

change in expectations

[khipu]

About 10 years ago, you used to get a small range of high-end monitors, and they cost around $1000. That really hasn't changed much. Back then, consumer and TV displays just weren't usable for a lot of computer desktop use. What has changed is that there is a glut of HD displays because of their use in consumer electronics. That has caused computer monitors that happen to have the same specs as consumer displays to fall in price dramatically. But the high end $1000 displays are still there if you want them, and there really are almost as many devices at the high end of the market as there used to be (meaning, maybe a handful). It's just that your expectations have changed and you don't consider them a good deal anymore because HD displays for less than $200 are actually quite good. There's also diminishing returns: a 30" 2560x1440 monitor just isn't a lot better than one (or two!) 1920x1080 monitors, whereas a 1920x1080 is a lot better than a 1280x800 monitor.

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

Don't want to be a dick, but my Macbook Pro 17" has the same key spacing as my Apple Keyboard.

Like this one, with the speakers on either side of a tiny, cramped keyboard?

Or did your mean the new new 2012 models, which clearly have exactly the same keyboard for both the larger and smaller models?

Or maybe your point is that that Apple has made their normal keyboards cramped too?

Compare those to real keyboard, made for people who use them for typing: It has a gap between the numbers and function keys, the ESC button is separate, the function keys are grouped in sets of four, the arrow keys have a space around them in all directions and are normal sized, and there are dedicated keys for insert, delete, home, end, pg-up, and pg-dn, in the standard position, with a space around them.

By the way, I just compared the width of my laptop to my normal, standard-sized desktop PC keyboard. Ignoring the numeric keypad, which I never use, the laptop is 4 cm wider than the desktop keyboard. There is absolutely no reason why it couldn't have been made to have the exact same layout!

The doubly stupid part of this whole thing is that laptop keyboards are replaceable. They're manufactured as this little metal tray thing that can be separated easily from the rest of the laptop. Why don't manufacturers make half a dozen different layouts, and let people chose? Some people may want a numeric keypad, some may want dedicated ins/del/etc... keys instead, some people may want media-control keys, others might prefer properly spaced function keys, etc...

Re:A tad longer than that

[jpapon]

As far as I can tell, they're only available on Ebay, shipping directly from Korea.

I may be wrong, but I suspect there's something in place preventing these from being imported to the US/European markets for resale. Dell may have some sort of deal with the panel manufacturer or something.

There has to be something like that, since the price (shipping included) is ~$300... meaning you could probably import them to the US in bulk for under $250. They would sell like hotcakes at $350, especially since they're the same panel as the Dell U2711, but with an LED backlight instead of the power hungry tube used in the Dell. It's basically the Apple Cinema Display at a third of the price.

ThinkPad

[tepples]

If any employees of Dell, HP, or Asus are reading this

What about Lenovo? The keyboards in ThinkPad laptops (not the cheapest ones that I'm told are rebadged IdeaPad) are so renowned for quality that Lenovo has started making a version for desktop PCs.

Re:A tad longer than that

[guises]

Shimian panels are rejects from Apple, meaning that they often have problems.

It's buyer beware and the fact that you have to get it shipped from Korea means that you're probably not going to be able to return it. That said, they're cheap and often good so, you know, there you are.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

The key feel, size, and spacing on the MBP, the Apple USB keyboard, and Apple bluetooth are all the same. I'm not sure about the MB, but I think it is also the same.

All Apple keyboards also work in windows and Linux.

Re:You Don't Need eBay: 2560 x 1440 IPS, $400, Ret

[Bing Tsher E]

Indeed. Why would you need eBay, unless you want do something as questionable as paying $100 less, including shipping? Don't do it! Your friends will make fun of you for not having the proper branding on your purchase.

Re:A tad longer than that

[bhtooefr]

Although Catleap et. al. shows that there is a market for defective displays.

(That's how they get their panels so cheap, FWIW.)

Re:A tad longer than that

[Shadow99_1]

I had a 1600x1200 CRT for ages, but a couple years back I finally replaced it because I got tired of messing with a DVI to VGA adapter to keep using it and got a 1920x1080 LCD instead. It is arguably of roughly equal capability, though wider and not as tall. It doesn't weigh 60 lbs though, which is nice when I've had to move it...

Re:A tad longer than that

[thoth]

I think the answer to this, why that doesn't exist, is a misunderstanding.

The free-market isn't a magic factory that produces stuff tailored to your specific desires. It responds to aggregate demand. If this item isn't made then either 1) no corporation perceives demand, or 2) no corporation thinks they can make it AND sell it for more profit than some other product that is already out there.

I think #2 applies here. The people willing to buy a nicer laptop (screen, keyboard) at a higher price aren't a large enough market for a corporation to really care about. From their eyes, the delta in customers they would gain buying the fancier laptop, isn't worth it.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Tastecicles]

I have a Toshiba 755D laptop bought as a desktop replacement last April (OK you can stop laughing now). The keyboard is just fine for my pianist hands, didn't even have to adjust. I also have an Asus 1008HA netbook. The keyboard on that is half the size, yet I can still type just as fast on that as on the Toshiba. That said, I do still revert to my classic (I mean, PS/2 connector!) Microsoft Natural keyboard for really long projects simply because that is *the* most comfortable keyboard I have ever used. Bar NONE.

As to the original topic, it pisses me off that a technology that went mainstream for computers first (lcd screens) has been coopted for television sets, and now we have people ON SLASHDOT saying "if you want better resolution get a TV."! Fuck you! I DO NOT WANT A TV, I WANT A COMPUTER MONITOR WITHOUT THE BAGGAGE OF A UK TV LICENCE.

Pedantic Correction

[bregmata]

Most moder proofers are 600 or 700 dpi. Most modern presses are 1200 dpi or more.

A printer is someone with ink stains on their sleeve and who wears a funny paper hat.

Re:Pedantic Correction

[YttriumOxide]

Most moder proofers are 600 or 700 dpi. Most modern presses are 1200 dpi or more.

A printer is someone with ink stains on their sleeve and who wears a funny paper hat.

Yep, that is a pedantic correction, but you're quite right. I was using the word "printer" meaning "generic home or office device that puts ink or toner on paper"

The lines between devices get a bit blurry with the mid to high end now talking about digital presses (which aren't in any way shape or form "presses") and the low end office devices being blurred closely with home devices of course.

Re:Pedantic Correction

[Hognoxious]

the low end office devices being blurred closely with home devices of course.

I see what you did there. Well almost, I can't quite make it out...

Just More Pixels, Not PPI

[Doc Ruby]

I don't need the PPI of an iPad on my desktop. But I do want the most pixels I can get. An 8Kx4.5K monitor doesn't have to be 24x13". In fact I'd prefer it be 48x26" - a real desktop. For 25 years I've had to work on a virtual desktop that's the size of an old legal pad or smaller. I want my whole desktop back. I want two of them: one horizontal desktop, another the wall behind it.

The higher PPI costs the real money for mobile devices with "entertainment quality" resolution, just as shrinking any process size costs money. Large area displays also cost money, since manufacturing defects are typically n per square inch, which means discarding lots of panels.

I don't know why we don't already get large displays made from panels of smaller displays. When we do, they have a frame that makes assembling multipanels have an annoying "tictactoe" grid. Instead, the front panel plastic should flare to the sides as it rises towards the viewer, a 45deg angle from the pixel plane to the frontmost surface. That would make a lens that enlarges the image slightly, getting it over and past the edges. Laminate a film across the several panels, and clip the panels together with a grid hidden inside the outwards flaring bezels.

Give me a desktop that's 4x4 HD panels each at 160PPI and another backstop against the wall. That should cost me something like $2500. That would be a lot cooler than an iPad.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[jellomizer]

While a first post off topic troll. I will relate it with the topic at hand.
The key reason why we don't have high resolution PC displays, is partially because the current Operating Systems, are not configured to use them.
Sure they may be able to support the resolution, however your start bar will be very tiny and unreadable, on windows, in Linux Unity will be this very thin little strip with some static in the corner, OS X will have a tiny doc. The apps will be too small to read, especially for older viewers who still keep their 20" screens at 800x600 display.

I have an RDP app for my iPhone, I configured the setting to connect to a windows server at the phone native resolution. The start bar wasn't that much bigger then 1 or 2 pixel high on at 300x200 display, on a 17" monitor.

Now many of the next generation Desktop Operating Systems, are trying to move away from the 72ppi idea, and make their systems more resolution independent. But they are not quite out there yet. Once the OS's start supporting these screens and displaying apps that are viewable, then the hardware makers will put more effort into making systems with such displays.

Cheap WUXGA Notebook?

[Doc Ruby]

I use one workstation for nothing but its display. No real CPU strain beyond viewing static office docs, non-animation/video webpages, OWA. I want a notebook for aal-in-one relocatability (not frequent mobility), builtin UPS, energy efficiency.

I want a WUXGA (or higher) notebook, but I wind up paying for fast GPUs, fast CPUs that are wasted. I'd rather spend on RAM and SSD.

Where can I find a big, slow notebook like that for under $1000?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard this complaint, but I think people just need to look more. My wife has a 17" HP Pavilion Laptop with full size keyboard and numpad. Her previous laptop had the exact same features.

Re:A tad longer than that

[jedidiah]

If there's money to be made then someone will grab it.

If someone is not grabbing it, that means that there are barriers in the market preventing someone from doing so. Someone wants to sell you that product.

The free market is merely a reflection of liberty as it relates to human greed.

Re:A tad longer than that

[O('_')O_Bush]

500$ isn't worth it to your OEM, since nobody else has the life crippling handicap of the inability to move a USB connector a few inches to plug in a full keyboard into the side of their laptop or dock.

here you go

[buddyglass]

Like most monitors, this one is used to watch boobies.

Re:here you go

[Skapare]

Seems to be popular. Already sold out. Damn you /. geeks.

Maybe a problem and maybe not...

[Anonymous Coward]

About a decade ago I was working on a 17" CRT Sony Trinitron for Web and other design related work. The resolution was 1280 x 1040 (max if I'm not mistaken). I worked on it for quite a long time even when the LCDs where becoming affordable and mainstream. The reason was simple - I needed to switch resolutions at will and at size. With such CRTs you were able to make it work for you.

The switching of resolutions was in part to help see what end users with lower resolutions were faced with (with sites of wider layouts and at best it was a pain). While a few LCDs back then allowed adjustment down to the pixel the majority only stretched whatever was on screen to fit.

When I first heard of the retina display it reminded me of what I was doing back then. I wasn't off the mark, to fully take advantage of the display the web designer would have to create at least a couple different sizes of images on a page to produce the best quality of an image (pending on the device viewing it).

It may not be a bad thing for retina like desktop displays to exist right now, as HTML5 et al are becoming mainstream for UI design, however, we still need more time for HTML5 et al and browsers for that matter to mature before we can fully take advantage of such high resolution displays.

XKCD's take

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/732/

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

apple has a 17 inch laptop.

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

I think it's a combination of momentum, apathy, and ignorance.

It's definitely worth it, because I can't be the only human being on earth who wants to use one of the only two input devices on a laptop for its intended purpose! If I'm willing to pay more for a decent keyboard, so are other people.

The problem is more likely that until relatively recently (compared to PCs), all laptops were 15" or smaller. Monitors still had a 4:3 aspect ratio, so there just wasn't enough space for a full-width keyboard in any laptop model. Hence, compromises had to be made.

Since then, wide-screen 17" laptops have become commonplace, but nobody has realized that with the keyboard width constraint gone, there's no reason to persist with the design optimized for smaller devices. It just hasn't "clicked" with anybody that this is an important compromise to undo.

I guarantee you that the first decent 17" laptop with a proper keyboard will cost on the order of $1 more to make, and it will be a best-seller for the corporation with the "vision" to make it.

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

because people sit a hell of a lot closer to a monitor than they do a TV and above 24 inches, 1080p resolutions look awful when sitting that close.

Stupid question

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any minimum system requirements for running a monitor at 1440p? I want to connect a notebook and a netbook. The netbook has integrated graphics and the notebook has a 1GB dedicated graphics card.

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

even with zero barriers, if there are only a small number of people compared to the market that might consider buying the device, they will not produce it because of the costs to produce, advertise and sell the product to such a small number of people eat up the profits.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree! In 2004, I remember purchasing a gaming laptop with nice resolution at the time. In 2007, I went to replace it and found that I could only go down in resolution! Previous to that I had been able to get a nice bump every 3-4 years. And ever since then, I have only been able to get 1080p in my monitors unless I wanted to pay a premium. (On NewEgg you can get 1200 for around 500 and larger than that if you shell out 900-2000).

I blame the fact that HDTVs came out around that time and that most monitors and TVs are made from similar parts. How the TV manufacturers managed to convince us that this was 'good enough' however, I still don't know.

Obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/732/

Re:A tad longer than that

[Carewolf]

Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.

Guess again. Printers use 1200dpi for a reason. While you can't spot the individual pixel at 600dpi we can easily tell 1200dpi looks better, and 300dpi print is so low res any human with normal vision can tell it is crappy printing from several meters away.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 17" Alienware that I purchased last January for $2k and it has a full sized keyboard in it. It has 120hz but an average resolution for a laptop of its size.

What good are they?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the whole point of wanting such hi-res displays? Is there any appealing content out there that supports this hi res?

Personally, I'm waiting for that Sony HMZ-T1 headset thing to get a higher resolution, because it's only 720p right now.
Now that's something I'd pay good money to get hi-res for, since it also increases the immersion, for Virtual Reality purposes.

But why would you want to surf the internet in 2560x1440? Just to give yourself eyestrain when reading Slashdot?
Just so that you could watch Youtube vids that are 1-square-inch?

Build the content, and then they'll come. But not before. Nobody's going to make 2560x1440 content just because there are displays out there that support that. Maybe think of VR applications, but that's about it.

Re:What good are they?

[jythie]

Ahm.. we have 'content', it is called an operating system. Monitors are used for more then just media consumption and playing games.

Want a killer app that can really use the extra space? Photoshop.

Re:What good are they?

[Lonewolf666]

Games can always use a more pixels, as the rendering will scale.
Also, working with multiple documents on a computer is easier with lots of screen area. I'm currently using a 2-screen setup at work (2x1920x1080), and sometimes I could use even more...

Re:What good are they?

[cayenne8]

What's the whole point of wanting such hi-res displays? Is there any appealing content out there that supports this hi res?

Content?

I use my big 59" plasma TV in the living room for playing 'content'.

A computer monitor...well, that's for work....and also for some 'play' like editing and color grading video and high resolution photography.

I have a Canon 5D Mark III camera, which shoots at the very high end of the scale, and I like to have a monitor that is high resolution and well calibrated to see the true colors I'm working with....

I have laptops and tablets around the house for just 'surfing'...and like I said, I have nice tvs and audio systems for media content (movies, etc)...but to me, the computer is my tool, and I like good tools for real work.

I've never understood the people that try to use one computer for everything...watching tv on a small computer screen? Not for me..

Re:What good are they?

[chrismcb]

These are NOT hi res displays. I've got a 21 inch monitor that is 1600x1200 next to a 30 inch that does 260x1600. But these aren't high resolutions. Things are a tad smaller, but not retina like. I don't need to squint. I can read slashdot just fine. And youtube isn't one inch, even the small version.

I still like my CRT

[Ptolom]

I'm still perfectly happy with my massive 2048x1536 Trinitron. My desk may be sagging in the middle, but it only cost £2 and has twice the resolution of the TFT next to it.

Re:I still like my CRT

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck is £2?

Re:A tad longer than that

[jythie]

It is less a case of 'lost' and more 'never had'. Screens are larger and higher resolution (for the price) then they have ever been. But bringing up the second screen is probably part of why these large high resolution screens are not catching on. Much cheaper just to get two regular screens and get a total area larger then the high resolution one. If you want more screen for your buck, high resolution just doens't cut it.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Hognoxious]

You're lucky - I got Gamemaker.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I just took a tape measure to my full size desktop keyboard and my apple keyboard. The spacing between the letter keys is larger on the apple keyboard. You are a stupid dick whining on the Internet from a position of complete ignorance.

For actual touch typists, the apple laptop keyboards are the best keyboards available at any price.

41Hz!

[Anonymous Coward]

‘The monitor's native refresh rate is 41 Hz.’

Not exactly great for gaming, or any kind of video. Would be fine for CAD which I guess is what it was for.

Re:41Hz!

[otuz]

It's not bad for video. You can go down to 30Hz, 24Hz or 25Hz to match the video frame rate exactly, if you must. Nothing prevents you from attaching lower res, higher refresh displays and TV's for some games and movies, however. I love playing games in high-res, even if they are limited by the display refresh rate. The monitors are also overclockable up to 60Hz refresh rates (I haven't tried it myself yet). The overclockable parts are the huge FPGA chips driving the panel circuits. To give enough bandwidth to drive them at those refresh rates, you need a pair of HDMI 1.3 outputs with HDMI-DVI adapters or a DisplayPort output with a dual DVI adapter.

Re:A tad longer than that

[sgtrock]

Says the guy who never used a Model M.

Re:A tad longer than that

[jpapon]

I agree with much of what you're saying, but keep in mind that alot of the edge of a laptop is used for things like an optical drive, USB ports, card readers, etc...

If you open up the laptop, there probably isn't the space, depth-wise, on the edges to contain a keyboard.

That being said, I agree they could make an effort to give laptops (other than desktop replacement ones) a better keyboard. As another poster pointed out, maybe the switch in consuming content to tablets will allow (force) laptop makers to find a different market, one that caters to people who actually do serious work on their laptops.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

You have described the reason Apple is at the top of the heap and the other cheap garbage companies are left fighting it out for the cheap garbage consumers. Seriously, Apple doesn't worry about $1 x 1 million machines = $1M in additional costs. Apple thinks, "if we spend $1 more on this keyboard, we'll sell 1 million more models".

I wish more marketing and business programs in the US would discuss this.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

That was always apples business model though. Remove every single option and just sell 1 product, It saves them a massive amount in every aspect of bringing hardware to market.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Hognoxious]

Of the laptops I've dismantled the keyboard "trough" is at most a few millimetres deep.

What's more the eee 100 I'm typing on has USB, ethernet & VGA ports under the keyboard area & they're all within 1cm of the key tops.

Re:A tad longer than that

[misexistentialist]

There is also this if you want to pay more for a scalar and for the right of return

Monitors ahead of desktops

[Maxo-Texas]

You can buy for $400 a 2560 x 1440 monitor on ebay.

That's with zero defect and hardened glass.

Problem?

You need a new computer to drive it.

GX670 or GX680 minimum.

Right now those set you back about $500.

Plus probably a new computer to drive those.

I'll have 2560 x 1440 in about 6 weeks. The monitor is here now.
As is the 120gb sata 3 solid state drive.

Re:Monitors ahead of desktops

[KozmoStevnNaut]

My old AGP 7600 GS could drive a 2560x1600 display all day long. All you need is dual link DVI.

My current GTX 460 has two of those plus HDMI, but I'm fairly comfortable with my 1920x1200 display for now.

Re:Monitors ahead of desktops

[Maxo-Texas]

That is wonderful news! I'm not a gamer. I'll see about getting a dual link dvi card.

To be honest, I posted hoping someone would post a solution.

Re:Monitors ahead of desktops

[Lazy Jones]

Not really true ... I am using a Dell 27" display with 2560x1440 and a Radeon 6850 all day long and also tested a 2560x1600 NEC display with a comparatively old core 2 duo E8400 and an (old) GeForce 8800GTX - no problems at all (both with cheap Dual-Link DVI cables).

Re:Monitors ahead of desktops

[KozmoStevnNaut]

You also need a dual link DVI cable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface#Connector), otherwise your cable will be the limiting factor.

In theory, single link DVI can just barely handle 1920x1200@60hz. In practice, I experienced visual artifacts such as flickering colored pixels until I got a dual link cable.

Luckily, dual link DVI-I cables are relatively cheap, so there's no reason not to get a fully-wired cable anyway :-)

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

The spacing on the Apple keyboard is the same between all the keys.

Take your hand off your keyboard, close your eyes, and then quickly press the F7 key.

You can't, can you?

I can on mine, because it's in an easy to find position. There's an extra large gap between F8 and F9, which is easy to find by touch, and then I move just one key to the left, and tada... F7 is right there!

Some of use all the keys on the keyboard, not just A-Z, which is apparently all that is required to write snarky comments as an anonymous coward.

Re:A tad longer than that

[ilsaloving]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have a 15" MBP and I just measured the distance between the F and the G keys, comparing them against the full keyboard I used. They're the same. Yes, the function keys and the arrow keys are squished, but I honestly didn't notice or care until you mentioned it. But for conventional typing of documents, there's no difference.

That being said, I agree that it's silly to squish keys that don't need to be squished when there's ample room available. If a laptop has room for something like a numeric keypad, they should provide one.

Given that the keyboard on MBPs are carved out of the single block of aluminum they use, I can see how it would be cost prohibitive to offer multiple keyboard types without a major retooling of their build process. It's too bad that Apple is in such financial peril. I'm sure if they were better off they would be able to divert some money to expanding the product line with other variations... *cough*

Re:A tad longer than that

[Hognoxious]

If there's money to be made then someone will grab it.

If someone is not grabbing it, that means that there are barriers in the market preventing someone from doing so.

... or there's not, in fact, any money to be made from it.

I had[1] one of these. Beautiful game controller for flying and driving, given the size (meaning when I was on the road I could take it with me). The downside? Fits via a game port. They never brought out a USB equivalent.

I'm not blaming it on some conspiracy theory though. I guess the old one didn't sell so many that they thought it was worth the effort of upgrading it.

[1] Actually, I still have it. What I don't have is a working useful 'puter to plug it into.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Alphathon]

Are you by any chance using a laptop screen? If so the reason 1080p looks fine without anti-aliasing is probably the pixel density. On my 24" display at its native resolution of 1920×1200 (i.e. 1080p with an additional 120 vertical pixels), anti-aliasing is a must on non-2D games. The pixels are about 0.3 mm to a side, or ~95 dpi, which makes them easily visible. On a 17" 1080p laptop screen however, each pixel is about 0.2 mm to a side (~130 dpi) and thus needs less AA to appear equally as "smooth" at the same viewing distance. To get a roughly equivalent pixel density (and thus equivalent "smoothness" and "sharpness") on a 24" 16:10 monitor, a resolution of about WQXGA (2560×1600) is required.

If however you are using a >=24" 1080p display at ~50 cm/1-2 ft then that may be more indicative of your visual acuity than anything else; not everyone's eyes are created equal. An individual with 20/20 vision should be able to distinguish individual pixels when they are above around 0.15 mm/side (~170dpi) at ~50cm, and be able to detect aliasing even beyond that.

With regard to the "sharpness" point, sharpness is determined by how small the smallest details are, so the higher the resolution the sharper an image will be; its that simple. Anti-aliasing has no affect on how sharp and image is, it is designed to make edges smoother (i.e. remove aliasing (jaggies), not add detail).

drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

Consumer focused desktop displays are stuck at a lower resolution? Umm... yeah because they're oriented at the consumer.

For most users and their use of a display, the benefit of higher resolution has a certain curve of diminishing returns.
Similarly there is a curve of price they are wiling to pay for a display. Hmm... where do those curves intersect?
Everyone with even the slightest knowledge in economics can understand why desktop displays are "stuck" at lower resolution.

Hardly anyone NEEDs higher resolution displays... ( you could make the case for graphic designers, NLE editors, compositors *maybe*) but for 99% of those people, if you need more screen realestate, buy a 2nd or 3rd monitor.
Elite people WANT higher resolution displays.
It's hubris.

Call me when 4K displays 30inch 2.35:1 displays are $500

Re:Yo! Retina display, Mac user: Why they go toget

[arkane1234]

You seem to associate the media and users as the same. Should everyone associate the media and America, as well?
Anything Apple related and being commented on by the media should be taken with a grain of salt. They want something that will draw eyes, and it's mostly what they use.

Most Mac users think it's a neat invention, and probably will get it, but are about as abuzz about it as the world was during the move from VGA to SVGA in the industry of the past.

TV's suck as computer monitors

[knorthern knight]

> As far as displays go, why are you adverse to buying TVs? TVs are much
> cheaper than comparable computer monitors, and if you do your research.
> For example, a 32" monitor will run you between $700-$900, but you can
> get a very nice LED TV you can use as a monitor for half that.

a) Computer monitors tend to be much sharper than TV displays. Fuzzy displays don't work for computing

b) TV sets are still being manufactured with overscan http://hd.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/ just like they were 50 and 60 years ago... "because we've always done it that way". I have a 50" HDTV that's useless as a computer monitor, because the edges are all cut off, and the menu bar at the bottom is mostly invisible. It's great for feeding NHL Gamecenter Live into the HDMI (Flash inside a resizable Firefox window), but for spreadsheets/email/etc, it sucks.

A slightly fuzzy display is perfectly OK for motion (e.g. TV or streaming internet video), becuase you don't notice it with all the movement. But it bites when you read straight text.

Re:TV's suck as computer monitors

[ShakaUVM]

>a) Computer monitors tend to be much sharper than TV displays. Fuzzy displays don't work for computing

HDMI TVs can be just as crisp as monitors.

>TV sets are still being manufactured with overscan

Sure, and if you're stuck in the 1980s, you'd be in trouble.

Fortunately, you can buy many (most?) TVs with 1:1 pixel mapping these days. Sometimes you'll see it described as computer mode, or something like that.

Re:TV's suck as computer monitors

[toddestan]

Fortunately, you can buy many (most?) TVs with 1:1 pixel mapping these days. Sometimes you'll see it described as computer mode, or something like that.

Unfortunately, for many TVs that's only if you use the "PC" input, which in TV-speak is a VGA port. So you can either enjoy your fuzzy analog picture, or the overscan on the HDMI port.

Now, I know all TVs aren't that way, but its difficult to know exactly what the TV will do without until you hook it up and try it.

Re:TV's suck as computer monitors

[ShakaUVM]

Sure, you need to double check that your TV won't overscan on HDMI, but neither of my TVs do. You can pick up a no-name (Insignia) 32" 1080p TV from Best Buy for $229 that has PC Mode on HDMI.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Insignia%26%23153%3B+-+32%26%2334%3B+Class+/+LCD+/+1080p+/+60Hz+/+HDTV/4550185.p?id=1218483794718&skuId=4550185&st=insignia%2032%22&cp=1&lp=1

Re:A tad longer than that

[rhook]

Do you have a link to get one at that price? The ones I've seen are HP branded and cost quite a bit more.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Hognoxious]

You mean something like this: http://www.cnet.com/laptops/alienware-aurora-m9700/4505-3121_7-31878926.html ?

Re:You Don't Need eBay: 2560 x 1440 IPS, $400, Ret

[Skapare]

A monitor with ROUNDED sides shows a company NOT interested in designing into it what matters.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, once their fruity corporate overlords release a laptop/desktop that has a large PPI, people will then flock to it -- even if you can only barely notice a difference for an extra $500-1,000

This crappy laptop is running a 15.5" display at 1280x800. I also have a 16.4" 1980x1050 display as well. I can't tell the difference between them, despite one having higher DPI

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

You're arguing against the imaginary voices in your head. I have no problem hitting the f7 key on my Apple keyboard by touch. I have no idea how you decided what keys I can hit by touch, and which keys I can't hit by touch, but the next time you decide to pull out assumptions about random strangers in the internet you should just shove your ideas right back where they came from.

You're an idiot, and you're arguing from a position of profound ignorance.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a Model M guy for years, but I actually prefer the Apple keyboard now. After a period of adjustment, I find that I type faster with less fatigue on the chiclet keyboard. Of course, anecdotes aren't data and YMMV.

Re:A tad longer than that

[nbsr]

Printers use that high resolution because they are essentially 1-bit-per-color devices (sometimes slightly more). To get grayscale they need dithering, which reduces the effective resolution a lot (64 levels of grayscale need, in the worst case, 8x8 pixels for one logical pixel).

Re:A tad longer than that

[repvik]

Most gamers I know are more focused on FPS than resolution. There simply isn't enough oopmh on current display adapters to drive a extra-high res display at >60FPS in bleeding-edge games.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I was able to get a U2711 at my University for $600. I must say it was well worth it.

Re:A tad longer than that

[AmiMoJo]

Plus even with higher resolution the imagine still won't look as good without AA, so you would have to have both. Without AA you will still have hard edges and the eye is very sensitive to them. In the real world most edges are not razor sharp 90 degree cuts, they are slightly rounded, but no-one bothers to model that with polygons and just relies on AA.

Re:A tad longer than that

[AmiMoJo]

Depends why they were rejected. Dead pixels would be annoying, 0.5% inaccurate colour not so much. Might even be just that the brightness doesn't go all the way up to the retina burning level they like to set in shops (Samsung TVs are the worst for that).

More information is required.

Re:A tad longer than that

[cayenne8]

Interesting....but what are your options when buying this for problems/returns?

I'm not worried about power problems....but the nice price is tempting, and will look at them as that I'd like to get two or three of these monitors for a nice set up for editing video....

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you haven't seen the new Unreal Engine 4 demos. It looks spectacular and the realism only benefits from more PPI.

Re:A tad longer than that

[cayenne8]

Hmm...looking at the ads on ebay..they only seem to be dual -DVI....

I've so far, only had success with hooking a macbook pro to the Dell u2711....to get full resolution with displayport....so, not sure these monitors would work?

Re:A tad longer than that

[guises]

More information is required.

Well yeah, that's the point - you don't know why your monitor was rejected and you won't until you turn it on.

Here, there's a thread with more information. Looks like you've got a chance of a little over 80% to get a good one:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1215866/reviewed-400-2560x1440-ips-no-ag-90hz-achieva-shimian-qh270-and-catleap-q270

I believe that....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply a supply failure as a result of the inherent inferiority of the globalist structured "free trade". Sure, all those wage slave hordes of third worlders might work somewhat inexpensively AT FIRST, but then you find out that you really get what you pay for and they can't really cope with managing highly complex manufacturing sectors at an equivalent competency over the long term than the first world countries from which the sectors were looted.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.

Ask someone with a dead/stuck pixel, the answer is YES!!!!!!

Please, stop censoring the truth.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really a supply failure as a result of the inherent inferiority of the globalist structured "free trade". Sure, all those wage slave hordes of third worlders might work somewhat inexpensively AT FIRST, but then you find out that you really get what you pay for and they can't really cope with managing highly complex manufacturing sectors at an equivalent competency over the long term than the first world countries from which the sectors were looted.

Don't Forget Color Depth

[fast turtle]

I know many think that an LCD is the Cats meow when it comes to getting work done and they're right. Power Consumption is far better, little/no flicker as the old CRT's did with flourecent lights along with the lower heat output but and it's a damn big BUT the color depth of an LCD is useless to me. Hell I've got a nice 23inch 1080 monitor and the stinking color depth is only 6 bit. Remember that's less then the 8 bit Web safe colors of yesteryear and I've been missing even a decent 16bit depth from a 1280x1024 CRT display because of the lack.

What I want is a decent 1920x1200 CRT that handles a proper 32bit color depth that can be calibrated correctly instead of the shit they're calling High Definition now days. Sorry folks but color depth for Photographers rules, not resolution and I want at least a 16bit depth instead of the so called HD that's only 6bit depth. Worthless Pieces of shit.

Re:Don't Forget Color Depth

[otuz]

If resolutions go up, the bpp could actually be brought down. Dithering won't be visually distinguishable even at let's say 4bpp @ 600ppi. At 100ppi it's definitely distinguishable, of course, because you can distinguish each pixel.

Ink dots per inch != Pixels per inch

[Dogtanian]

Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.

Guess again. Printers use 1200dpi for a reason. While you can't spot the individual pixel at 600dpi we can easily tell 1200dpi looks better, and 300dpi print is so low res any human with normal vision can tell it is crappy printing from several meters away.

The problem here is that the "dpi" figures for monitors and displays vs. that given for printers *don't* refer to the same thing and they can't be directly compared. (*)

A pixel can typically have one of a *large* number of shades and brightnesses, whereas an ink dot generated by a printer is a single dot (usually one of four or sometimes six ink colours at most). The latter have to be dithered to generate the illusion of shading, which effectively means lower resolution. (**)

This image is somewhat helpful in illustrating the point.

(I would point to the Wikipedia articles (Dots per inch and Pixel density), but I found them a bit unclear, and in fact one of them has been tagged.)

(*) This isn't really your fault, so much as it's a problem with the generally-accepted (mis?-)usage of "dpi" to describe both "pixels per inch" and "(ink) dots per inch" obscuring that fact.
(**) Of course, it's more complicated than that, as (e.g.) with crisp, high-contrast material like text, there's no shading and the effective resolution will be higher. But for arbitrary photographic material with a range of shades, it won't be.

Re:Ink dots per inch != Pixels per inch

[Carewolf]

The high resolution printing is mainly used for text which is not dithered. The dithering argument only makes sense for photo-printing. In reality all the first high DPI laser printers supported neither grayscale nor color, they just use it for sharper line drawing.

Re:A tad longer than that

[hey!]

Well, I just gave up and got an external keyboard and folding laptop stand. This is not only more ergonomic, it has the advantage of extending the lifetime of my laptops. I write so much the keys fall off. My palms even wear through the finish of the palm rests. Who knew that the plastic under the black Thinkpad finish was blue-green?

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

You know that anti-aliasing is just the simulation of a higher resolution using subpixels right?

Good anti-aliasing means you render the scene at a higher resolution and then down-scale it to the user resolution. If the user had the original resolution, the anti-aliased version would look worse.

Try this: take a photo that's 1920x1080 and looks really good. Now scale it down with your favourite app and good scaling algorithm to 960x540. Now view it maximized on your 1920x1080 display. That's what your'e missing out on by not having a 3840x2160 resolution screen right now with your current 2x anti-aliasing. (more for 4x, etc.)

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

Part of the problem is that Windows has traditionally handled resolution scaling very poorly as well. So long as everyone had 800x600 displays, Windows 95 worked great, Windows XP loved 1024x768 and so on. With everyone on the same resolution, all those software writers who don't understand scalable fonts and layouts have it much easier.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, they're only available on Ebay, shipping directly from Korea.

Try Microcenter: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0384780

Same panel as the Korean models, but designed for US 120V power, 1 year warranty, and more inputs. $400.

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

My old 15" CRT *many moons* ago had nearly 1080p resolutions. A little sad really...

http://reviews.cnet.com/crt-monitors/adi-microscan-4p/4507-3175_7-143958.html for those who don't believe me.

foobar-censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

This a supply failure as a result of the inherent inferiority of the globalist structured "free trade". Sure, all those wage slave hordes of third worlders might work somewhat inexpensively AT FIRST, but then you find out that you really get what you pay for and they can't really cope with managing highly complex manufacturing sectors at an equivalent competency over the long term than the first world countries from which the sectors were looted.

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

Agreed; I sit 9 feet from a 103" DLP screen in my livingroom for all my gaming. Its a great resolution to distance ratio, also fills most of the field of vision well.

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

There are a few good display calculators online to calculate what you're looking for, like this one:

http://bhtooefr.org/displaycalc.htm

Try it out with resolutions and distances you already know you like to compare.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

a ham sandwich can play PC games @ 1440 x 900 @ low settings.

my under-$200 GPU plays games @ 2304 x 1440 @ high / max settings + buttloads of AA.

Re:A tad longer than that

[locketine]

I have 20/20 vision and I cannot resolve 1080p on a 15.4" monitor that's 20" away unless I focus like I did when I took my last vision test which is not a comfortable state to be in. In other words, what is your source?

well, chaps

[Anonymous Coward]

you can still buy a sony gdm fw900 24" CRT, grade A condition, calibrated for, oh, $1000.

2304 x 1440 @ 85hz, 24", 16:10, takes a good hour to warm up, accurate color, great black levels...

Re:A tad longer than that

[poly_pusher]

@1080p and what screen size? A 22 inch 1080P screen is going to look great. 27" will start to show aliasing, 30" and it get's quite noticeable.

Re:A tad longer than that

[ShakaUVM]

So you buy a small 1080p TV, then.

As I said, if you do some legwork, you can save yourself hundreds of dollars for a TV that can look better than a normal monitor.

Re:Yo! Retina display, Mac user: Why they go toget

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want more dots, and I'd rather that they not be too small. I just want more up-down space for drawing and painting. Having to scroll up and down in order to see a whole image while zoomed in to a decent work size is frustrating.

Retina's 2048 x 1536 on a screen around 17" diagonal, with Wacom stylus input would actually be just about perfect.

But I realize I exist in a niche market.

Re:A tad longer than that

[fredgiblet]

You know that anti-aliasing is just the simulation of a higher resolution using subpixels right?

Which is FAR less power intensive than actually rendering at a higher resolution.

That's what your'e missing out on by not having a 3840x2160 resolution screen right now with your current 2x anti-aliasing. (more for 4x, etc.)

You know what else I'm missing out on? Having to have a GTX 580 to get playable framerates. Just wait till the next-gen consoles come out as well, then playing games at 3840x2160 will require a 690.

Re:A tad longer than that

[fredgiblet]

a ham sandwich can play PC games @ 1440 x 900 @ low settings.

Indeed, what's your point?

my under-$200 GPU plays games @ 2304 x 1440 @ high / max settings + buttloads of AA.

What games? A 6870 won't play Metro 2033 at those setting playably according to Toms.

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

Asus 24 inch 1080p monitor at Amazon: $189 http://www.amazon.com/Asus-VW246H-24-Inch-Integrated-Speakers/dp/B001LYWBOM

24 inch 1080p TV at Amazon: $189 http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-24SL410U-24-Inch-1080p-LED-LCD/dp/B004MFBH7O/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1339279542&sr=1-1

Unless you are looking for a dual use device, the monitor will end up serving you better in my experience because all the price goes to making it work well as a computer monitor. the TV is meant to work well as a TV.

Re:A tad longer than that

[i]

I'm currently running a 24" at 1900x1200 for the transalted sum of ca $400 and have a 24" analog monitor that runs at 1600x1200 and have the possibility to run a much larger resolution. I was dreaming of 2560x1600 - 20 years ago and is still dreaming... (I think I will buy a Dell UltraSharp U3011 soon.)

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

Nope, that's still crap. Take a look at this photo, which shows the keyboard clearly.

All the keys are jammed up against each other. The space between the number row and the function key row is missing, the arrow keys butt up against three other keys, etc... In other words, it has exactly the issues as every other laptop keyboard.

I've looked: to my knowledge, no laptop manufacturer on Earth has ever made a decent laptop keyboard, despite oodles of room on most 17" models. No such thing exists.

astroturfing

[Anonymous Coward]

Things are about to change. In a couple of days, Apple will refresh all of their laptop and desktop machines with Retina displays. Once they do this, it won't be long before PC manufacturers start moving to higher-res displays, in order to keep up. Exactly the same happened with the MacBook Air and Intel's Ultrabook initiative.

Why do I get this impression that TFA's posting to /. is nothing but a plant to drum up interest in whatever Apple posts?

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

Except that some of us actually use our laptops for their intended purpose, and move them around with us, which makes a dock or other full-size peripherals impractical. Also, even if I had a keyboard, this places the laptop further away from me, making the screen harder to read. Not all of us have 20/20 vision.

Unlike people who buy a laptop to just to leave it sitting there in the same location, I have a desktop PC for that purpose... with a USB keyboard.

ePaper Display for Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Retina display maybe wanted by Gamer.
But I see bigger market, which is display for office use. which is a huge market.
At office we want display which is easy to see but not make our eyes fatigue.
a paper is a good start i think. which now available on color.
at many office, people mostly use for Office applications, Browsing and standard applications. I guess color e paper display is enough or at least need to tweak little bit.
I wonder why nobody is looking at this market and sell such display ?

Re:A tad longer than that

[julesh]

You do know that having a TV does not mean you have to pay for a licence, don't you? A licence is required for *the act of receiving live broadcast TV*.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

Try Google.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

Catleaps are either sold out or, if you can find one right now on eBay, it's not going to be the 120Hz version, yet.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

The panel in the Catleap 120Hz is probably actually the same one in the Apple Cinema Display (this is one of the theories, anyway). Considering that the Catleap was selling for $350 incl shipping, you can see the massive markup that Apple adds, as it does with all of its other products. I can't say if they are available in Europe. You can buy these monitors in shops in Korea, though, and now in Micro Centers in USA.

Re:A tad longer than that

[julesh]

Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.

No. The limit of human visual resolution is approximately 1 arc-minute. At a distance of 20", this equates to about 0.006", or approximately 172dpi. Which is still nearlt 50% higher than the 120dpi of the highest resolution monitor I see in a quick web search.

(Note you also cannot resolve 326dpi at 12" - 286dpi is about the highest you can resolve at that distance. You'd have to hold your iPhone 4 at just 10.5" in order to be able to see all of its pixels.)

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

Just note that they have different video connections, and often only Dual-DVI connections.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

ebay.com

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

>macbook

I've discovered your problem. Just so you know, "it just werks" was a slogan, not reality.

Also, your grammar is horrid.

peace out

Re:A tad longer than that

[ChrisMaple]

Except for the few printers with dot size control, printer pixels are either full on or full off, whereas monitors are 8 bits per pixel. For a printer to get 256 shades of grey, a 16x16 array is required, so the 1200 dpi becomes 75 dpi. (There are some visual system effects that make the reduction not quite so severe, but the principle is correct.) My point is, except for line drawings, printouts and displays are not comparable.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[ChrisMaple]

The kde taskbar has configurable size, and icons are available in a variety of sizes (or make your own, it's not that difficult.)

Re:A tad longer than that

[toddestan]

How about this one?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Ryanrule]

"I'd rather have current resolution and anti-aliasing than a slightly higher resolution."

How about you demand both and stop being a pussy?

A very long time

[dbIII]

At work I've recently retired my 19 inch CRT screens to move to the same resolution on a 20 inch IPS LCD screen at 1600x1200, which is sadly still considered close to the top end. When I lugged one huge and heavy CRT out of the place I noticed the date on the thing was 1997! Fifteen years old, not even close to the best of it's day and it's still got better screen resolution than a lot of LCDs now.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Tastecicles]

please understand, that intent is not the burden in civil law: only the ability*. If you HAVE something that is capable of receiving live broadcast video, then according to the Telecommunications Act you require a license - regardless of whether or not you bought a HDMI-ported TV with the intention of plugging in an antenna or you bought it because your graphics card has an HDMI output and the TV is a quarter the price of a professional panel with the same specification. The fact is that it *can* receive a signal and decode it, therefore the finding is that you are liable.

*This is also how they fucked my brother over. He had an air rifle that was 5% over the legal limit for a non-FAC air weapon. He didn't do as I'd advised (to demand a trial by jury in a criminal court), and the single magistrate in civil court not only had the weapon confiscated, but also dismissed his counterclaims against the police because during the dawn raid on his home they had removed several items without warrant, without cataloguing and without cause. Those items (some very rare and priceless paraphernalia) will never be seen again. Back to the real fuck-over: the only burden of proof on the police was that the weapon was overpowered. OK. They went a little further and said that the weapon was able to be turned up even further (not true, the hammer spring was sealed behind a solid rivet hence tampering was impossible without destroying the weapon), but the magistrate took the police at their word. Part of the judgement he said that the weapon was overpowered, had the potential to be powered up even further hence had to be confiscated. In a criminal court the burden would have been on the CPS to prove that the intent in buying a tamperproof weapon was to tamper with it and make it lethal at range. Notwithstanding the fact that it was only lethal if you were a rabbit at 70m or a tin can at 100m.

your grammar is horrid

[Anonymous Coward]

sez someone who uses 'peace' as a verb

Re:A tad longer than that

[Aggrajag]

I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME

I bought this Acer Aspire for my wife about three years ago for the exact same reason, although hers has a Core i5 instead of AMD.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-7540G-504G50Mi.47017.0.html

Re:A tad longer than that

[Carewolf]

Actually monitors dither too, most LCD-screens only support 6 bit of _one_ color in each dot, and then dither that to simulate 24 bit colors. Most IPS screens support 8 bit of color in each dot, but many of them dither that to pretend to support 10bit per color.

Re:A tad longer than that

[CAIMLAS]

Not to be dick, but: why would I want large gaps between the keys? What functionality does it serve? a .5cm gap between the home key block and anything else, or the function keys and the number keys, should be enough. You don't need an inch or more.

Personally, I prefer the Lenovo UltraNav keyboards (either with or without the numberpad, but without is just fine, thanks). I used to love my IBM Model M, but then realized it was causing undue movement. My wrists were getting fatigued. On the ultranav, this isn't the case: there's much less movement required in both my wrists and my fingers. Carpel tunnel numbness hasn't been a problem for years (and I tried many other keyboards getting here).

Apple, IMO, makes the second best 'independent' keyboard on the market. They're comfortable to type on and have all the physical keys you need (unless you deal with al ot of numbers). The only downside is that you still need to be reliant upon a mouse - one of the biggest causes for repetitive strain injuries.

I couldn't agree more with the 'replacable' keyboard option. The downside and difficulty there, of course, is that people would start to expect them to be compatible between different laptop models and vendors. Since a keyboard nad the screen are the two biggest points of distinction for many people (presumably) on a laptop, I'm guessing that may not fly... better to be unique and shitty. :)

Resolution good enough

[Anonymous Coward]

The present desktop resolution is good enough. More important is space. this is also related to resolution, as a bigger screen needs more pixels. But more pixels just to get a little sharper contours is mostly useless for normal desktop work. Additionally a higher PPI will require more GPU power and more bandwidth between graphic memeory and monitor. All in all it would consume more resources for not much of an benefit.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies that make laptops with silly keyboards (like the ones half-height up and down arrows symmetrically sandwiched between full-height left and right arrows) are simply shutting themselves out of *my* market, exactly like companies that offer barely high resolution 1920*1200 panels only in big, low DPI panels on ridiculously large and heavy laptops.

At work, my boss only recently let go of a rather ancient laptop: it had a 15'' 1680*1050 screen, an unavailable luxury today.

Re:A- panels tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

That something would be the grade of catleap and shimian panels. These manufacturers buy leftover panels that are graded at A- while Dell, Apple, and LG purchase all of the A+ panels at a higher cost. A- panels have imperfections that make them unsuitable for the US market. Fortunately, with a resolution as high as 2560x1440, the pixels are small enough that 'dead' or 'stuck' pixels don't really matter all that much...and issues with light diffusion are barely (if at all) noticeable.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your eyesight fixed. Reduced vision is a common effect of aging.

Re:A tad longer than that

[otuz]

There simply isn't enough oopmh on current display adapters to drive a extra-high res display at >60FPS in bleeding-edge games.

Gamers were happy with 320x200 resolutions back when 800x600 and 1024x768 were considered a regular productivity resolutions. Anyway, current display adapters aren't an issue. The lowend, decade-old equivalent low-end display adapters are, but who in their right mind would play high-res modern games on those?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

But Apple is also an example of the race to the bottom too. In fact, for some features they're leading the race. They've saved money/laptop by reducing the number of ports only to increase revenue by forcing people to buy dongles to connect to anything while pushing it like a feature. The dongles are cheap and crappy, despite carrying Apple's sleek visual design and matching price. Frequently they're forgotten or they introduce other issues. Mostly I'm thinking about using projectors with MacBooks and all of the times I've had to sit through conversations about whether anyone has a dongle compatible with their Mac and slide presentations where color was screwed up because the dongle was defective. It is absurd to me that people pay so much for a laptop that is so lacking in basic features.

Now other manufacturers are following in their footsteps because almost all of them are too risk averse to try anything else. Have you seen Dell's wannabe MacBook? I felt embarrassed for them because they didn't know to be embarrassed themselves... It's like the awkward kid in high school trying to fit in with the popular kids by mimicking their manner of style. When I had to get a new laptop I wanted something comparable in size and weight to Apple's 13", but with a higher resolution screen and a compliment of ports based in reality. I ended up getting a Sony Vaio SE because I could actually have all of these things. The laptop ended up being about half the price of the high end Apple 13" and still outspecced it in nearly every noticeable way. It may even be lighter too...don't remember. It's 4.5lbs though, a little more with the extra battery which gives 15hrs of power in Windows (only 5 in Linux :( ) Of course, there are other issues I'm not a fan of, but for the most part they're pretty trivial and it's been good overall. Unfortunately, they too reuse keyboards across their line.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 17" HP Elitebook 8560p with a full sized keyboard. No key is mashed up against any other key. Nearly every centimeter of the full width of the case is used by the keyboard, with no empty areas on either side. I perfectly describes what you claim to be looking for.

Also, the Dell UltraSharp U3011 monitor will display 30 bits at 2560 x 1600 resolution and 60 Hz. I realize that it's not the 36-bit color, or 120 Hz, or the 3D display you're looking for, but it is an extremely inexpensive "deep color" monitor that is mass-marketed to consumers. If you're looking for something better, you should call up companies that sell high-end video editing booths or high-end medical imaging companies. I'm sure you can find something with better resolution and better color depth, but you might find that they start to get expensive. But if the right monitor really is as important as you claim, I'm sure you won't mind spending a few hundred thousand dollars.

Re:A tad longer than that

[cayenne8]

I've got plenty of OSes to work with...linux, win7...I use the macbook pro to do my editing of videos and stills from my new Canon 5D3....

What happened to the right tool for the job, eh?

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the numeric keypad, which I never use, the laptop is 4 cm wider than the desktop keyboard. There is absolutely no reason why it couldn't have been made to have the exact same layout!

Wait a second... you want a keyboard with all the keys that you use in exactly the same places that you want them to be, but none of they keys that you don't use (like the numeric keypad).

Well, no wonder you met all of the well-meaning suggestions from reasonable and helpful people with an insufferable sneer. You have a bunch of precise requirements for this keyboard that are unique only to you, and you refuse any type of compromise. If you have an exact keyboard you need, then why don't you write down the specific, exact keys that you want your keyboard to have, and the specific exact keys you don't want your keyboard to have, and the exact configuration that you want them in (i.e., it must have exactly 12 function keys, and they must be across the top, and they must be in banks of four, and the print screen must be placed exactly so...) and send it off to HP or Apple or whoever you think is supposed to be your bitch. Tell them that you'll pay an extra $500 if they make a keyboard that is perfect for you.

Don't mention to them that you'll find some other pissy reason not to buy their laptop, like the display isn't 120 Hz, or maybe the power switch is the wrong shape, or whatever the fuck you seem to find wrong with every single thing in the whole world.

Good luck with that.

Re:Because a generation of Windoz progs

[lpq]

HTML5 and Win7 are fixing this....

The problem was early windows -- everything was in pixels.

Well, starting in HTML5, they redefined the pixel to be 1/100". That's right!

In order to correct for a generation (or two) of stupid programmers, (X11 programmers knew about DPI, but starting with windows ... that knowledge was lost). They now pat those programmers on the head and say "there there, it's ok, you go on using your pixels... and everything will be fine...)...

Meanwhile, real pixels can start going up, without print becoming tinier...

Win7 has made a primitive start in allowing this type of magnification -- but only in post-processing -- resulting in a less than ideal result. I.e. it has Winxp compatible resizing which resizes in pre-process, but widgets and graphics may not line up, and has a post-render resize which resizes everything, but only after it has been pixelized...(sigh)...

With the new system, output goes to a virtual display first, that is later rendered at device native resolutions...but the programmers and web designers will only see the software-pixel...

Yeah...give me a good keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyboard and monitor. It's where I meet the computer. I REALLY miss those old high response clicking keyboards of yesteryear. The feedback just so encouraged me to wail on those keyboards. Now it's all mush and mini. But they're not going to listen to us.

Re:Yeah...give me a good keyboard

[arkane1234]

zOMG teH markit anserz
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/

actually... Re:no such thing exists.

[Fubari]

but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.

To my knowledge, no such thing exists.

For your consideration:
Dell's Precision line of laptops has some models with comfortable full-size keyboards. I'm typing this on a Dell M6400 which is nice to type on; full-size keys (plus backlit, nice in projector low-light situations), and a 10-key keypad and a real row of FN-keys at the top (although the fn-keys are maybe 70% the size of the other keys).
Relevant to the original topic, the screen is 1900x1200. It is a gorgeous screen for a laptop.
Anyway, having added some SSD's (SATA2) in it, the machine is quite responsive (I have this one maxed out at 16gb ram, but that is comfortable to work with for a while). Downsides = big, heavy, and the power supply is the size + weight of a six pack (ok, maybe half that volume but it is huge). If you want a good keyboard + horse power + really nice display and great storage options (in addition to the two internal sata hdd slots, I added a 750gb drive in a optical-bay caddy since I almost never use DVD's these days) so I'm pretty well set for storage. (As an aside, this machine was built by Foxcon - I've taken it down to the motherboard a few times for various upgrades and replacements and - I have to say - Foxcon did *nice* work).

I'm going to use this another year or so then see if I can find something similar that has can use internal PCIe SSD(s) - I want to bypass sata and go for a PCIe x4 or x8 device (*shrug* I haven't seen that in a laptop yet for storage, but when that comes out it will be time to upgrade).

For a laptop, this one has a pretty sweet keyboard. You can find used ones on ebay at very affordable prices these days, thought I might suggest the M6500 or later because the M6400 doesn't have a function mPCIe slot. Study up on the various screen options, CPU options, GPU options (I've been pleased with the Quadro FX 2700m) so you understand the exact configuration you're getting.
*shrug* I'm just sayin, you can find laptops with nice keyboards if you look around a little.

Re:A tad longer than that

[bertok]

Close, it has visibly larger gaps where it should, but obviously it's not possible to buy it any more.

It still doesn't have the arrow keys or the ins/del/etc keys in the right locations.

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I will disagree with you as such but just point out that the Dock on in os x can be resized as you see fit so I am sure it can accommodate a "retina" display.

Keyboards like Momma (IBM) used to make

[hicksw]

Some posters have complained about cramped laptop keyboards.

My Thinkpads (T23, T30, T60) have 0.75 inch wide/high keys, just like my Model M.

They just don't sound quite as loud or feel quite as sound.
--
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd, because I've always preferred a higher resolution without AA than a lower one with. The former almost always runs smoother and looks sharper.

Radeon 5750 will do, $150

[Overzeetop]

Not only will it drive a 2560x1600 display, but will drive three displays with a combined resolution of 4960x1600. I know because I'm typing on it now - Dell 30" with a portrait 20" 4:3 (1200x1600) on either side. Heck, $150 is what I paid for my 5750 at least 2 years ago, I presume they're less now.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not a gamer, then. This is not a troll (any more than your blatant hyperbole was), but your system is a disgrace.

I'm running a quadcore from 2008 (QX9450) and SLI GTX 460s on my other gaming machine, and it has run every game released to date at moderately high framerates and quality settings. My whole system cost well under a grand, and it is ancient by today's standards.

If you can't afford even that, then stop pretending you're a gamer. Stick to Farmville.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Real gamers don't give a shit about graphics. We play on the lowest settings because speed and performance is everything.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be extremely young, or you haven't had a lot of exposure to anything but cheap-as-dirt PC clones. There is no standard placement for arrow keys or insert/delete keys. They've moved all over the keyboard through the years, and they will continue to move. Your claim that there should be some sort of "correct" key placement to match your preferences is laughably wrong.

Re:A tad longer than that

[ShakaUVM]

32" 1080p TV that has PC mode on HDMI: $229. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Insignia%26%23153%3B+-+32%26%2334%3B+Class+/+LCD+/+1080p+/+60Hz+/+HDTV/4550185.p?id=1218483794718&skuId=4550185&st=insignia%2032%22&cp=1&lp=1

On Newegg, both 32" monitors are $700+, and are lower resolution (1366 x 768).

Re:A tad longer than that

[Henk Poley]

I might be rather mistaken about this, but I've heard South Korea has some contracts where they are sort of grandfathered in from the time that they were still marked as a development country (1997).

Re:A tad longer than that

[lsatenstein]

The higher the resolution, the faster the processors required for the graphics card and in the monitor. Ergo, the higher the power consumption for each.

The next point is with respect to Quality Control of the monitor. The likelihood of a defective pixel or color LED is infinitesimal, but still occurs as a random distribution of the screen material (I believe defects follow the Poisson distribution). Therefore, in making very dense high resolution screens, will require many screens to be tested before a good one (low defects) is found.

If you make 10 screens but only 1 is suitable, costs are high, waste is high, and selling price is high. But with lower density screens, the leds are larger, and defect rates much much lower. Ergo, 1080p or 2000p, screens using very slightly larger leds have much lower defect rates.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Shimian panels are rejects from Apple, meaning that they often have problems.

According to the review someone posted the displays are glossing like Apple's too. No sale.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you have the right monitor there? I don't think of 1280 x 1024 native resolution as "nearly 1080p."

It's 56 lines short vertically, and only 63% of the screen real estate.

Of course, HDTV was really a way to apply digital monitor technology to television, so it's not surprising that your display was ahead of the game. I remember looking into ways to record SVGA video in the early '90s, but there was no recorder available yet with that kind of bandwidth.

If You Build it I will Come

[Nethemas the Great]

Panasonic 20" 4K2K demoed at CES.

If You Build it I will Come...

[Nethemas the Great]

Panasonic 20" 4K2K demoed at CES.

2048x1536 Samsung in 16:9 aspect

[MytQuinn]

I run 2 of these now discountinued monitors and love them. Still some available on the refurb market. I paid less than $200 each some 3 years ago. These work out to a 98 ppi density, which is damn close the retina definition. They are relative plan monitors that should have been marketed better and they would still be around IMHO. Find it funny that people are complaining about the lack of high resolution displays at reasonable prices, when one existed and flopped because people were afraid to lose a few FPS.

Re:A tad longer than that

[MikeBabcock]

56 lines short vertically isn't much; and given that the screens were all square at the time, its effectively the same resolution if you cut off the inivisible portions of a 1920x1080 display.

1920 is 1.5x wider than 1280, while a 16:9 screen is 1.33 times wider than a 4:3 screen.

The equivalent resolution, had a modern 1080p screen been cut to the same ratio, would be 1440x1080 which is only 18% higher.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Coren22]

I have dual 24" stacked, found a decent stand, something like this one:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/818015-REG/Bentley_D600_Vertical_Dual_Monitor_Stand.html

but mine has a desktop stand instead, it works quite well.

Re:A tad longer than that

[Coren22]

It looks like I have this one:

http://www.buy.com/pr/product.aspx?sku=208042786&sellerid=14369784http://www.buy.com/pr/product.aspx?sku=208042786&sellerid=14369784

but it is up to 24", so might not work for you.

Post was a fake

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a corporate sponsored setup...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/technology/apple-overhauls-mac-computers-and-introduces-new-mobile-operating-system.html

Re:Happy Friday from The Golden Girls!

[chrismcb]

The key reason why we don't have high resolution PC displays, is partially because the current Operating Systems, are not configured to use them.

Are you implying Windows is not a current OS? Windows does support high DPI.

fair weather haters

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that everyone hates on Apple, but they have the hook up

Re:A tad longer than that

[Soporific]

I did, and I used to type so hard I broke it. But I didn't realize they were still being sold.

~S

Re:A tad longer than that

[chrismcb]

My Sony Vaio, with a 14 inch screen has a "normal" sized keyboard. It doesn't have a numerical keyboard, or the keys between the numerical keyboard and the alpha keyboard. But if I measure the alpha portion of my desktop keyboard, its 11 inches. My laptop keyboard is 12 inches. The extra inch is for the Home, page up/down keys. The function keys are slightly shorter, but otherwise this keyboard is as good as my desktop one. And this is with my 14inch monitor
Perhaps you need to search harder.

Re:A tad longer than that

[kyrio]

I don't really care what you use.

I believe you can find monitors of those brands with HDMI and other outputs. Just search around eBay.

Re:A tad longer than that

[nomel]

If my screen cold fold back or rotate around, I would be all for this. Otherwise, no...your laptop ends up being across the table, and most computer desks are too short in these days of flat screens.

My last laptop screen had brackets that fit either way and it lived with the screen backwards just for this reason.

OSes? DPI? Give me a break.

[Anonymous Coward]

(I realize this is an old article)

CRTs have had higher resolutions in similar footprints for years. However, I'm sure half the people posting this stuff have never had a CRT hooked up to their computer (or any computer). Everyone yowling about DPI is mixing it up with PPI. The two are mechanically unrelated, especially on CRTs.

The Samsung 1100DF I had 5 years ago could do 2048x1536 (QXGA), on a 21" CRT. This was an extremely common maximum resolution and was available on sub-$200 monitors.

One of the most popular gaming monitors about ten years ago, the viewsonic P225f, could do 2560x1920.

It's not OSes, DPI, or anything else that has killed off high-resolution consumer grade displays -- it's the technology, as others already tried to point out. Making high resolution multisync CRTs was "easy." Making high resolution LCDs is "hard." It's really as simple as that.

All of you stuck on 1920x1080 (as I am now as well) seem to have never heard of VESA, and have no idea the resolutions that were once available to basically everyone.

High resolution, low refresh rate, when you're working mostly in text; lower resolution, higher refresh rate, when you're working mostly with video. This is the perfect tradeoff, and CRTs all did it on demand. The only real downside is the weight.

Re:A tad longer than that

[julesh]

please understand, that intent is not the burden in civil law: only the ability*. If you HAVE something that is capable of receiving live broadcast video, then according to the Telecommunications Act you require a license - regardless of whether or not you bought a HDMI-ported TV with the intention of plugging in an antenna or you bought it because your graphics card has an HDMI output and the TV is a quarter the price of a professional panel with the same specification. The fact is that it *can* receive a signal and decode it, therefore the finding is that you are liable.

You don’t need a TV Licence to own or possess a television set. However, if you use it to watch programmes as they are being shown on TV then you need a TV Licence in order to do so. Part 4 of the Communications Act 2003 sets out the requirement for a TV Licence. Section 363 makes it an offence to install or use a television receiver or possess or have control of a television receiver with the intent to install or use it or
possess or have control of a television receiver and know or have reasonable grounds for believing that another person intends to install or use it
without a valid TV Licence issued under the Communications Act. If you own or possess a television set without installing or using it as a TV receiver (e.g. you only use it to watch videos or DVDs, or as a monitor for a games console) then you don’t need a TV Licence.

(source)

Re:A tad longer than that

[arkane1234]

keyboard size is perfect on the Macbook pro, I'm not sure what you're on about.

It works for me, so it's okay for everyone.
Ohhhh, I'm sorry, that's your thought, not mine.

Re:A tad longer than that

[arkane1234]

I use the f and j key nubs.
It's all you need to figure out where your fingers are.
I also don't touch type F keys, since they aren't in sentences.

Re:A tad longer than that

[arkane1234]

s/Real/Legacy/;

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

and 32 inches the pixels are huge and it looks like ass from 18 inches away.

Re:A tad longer than that

[modmans2ndcoming]

and the resolution of a 32" COMPUTER monitor is NOT 1366 x 768. those monitors are meant as signage.

Re:A tad longer than that

[ShakaUVM]

Buy a smaller one then. But they don't look bad at all. I use one.